The Gender Equality Checkpoint

[classicman]

you're fired.

[sexobon]

You're fired.

(U r fired)

[Clodfobble]

Is the sudden, unexpected pregnancy of current female soldiers an issue? Is the rate of female soldier pregnancy higher or lower than the current rate of unexpected injury among male soldiers?

In my experience most female military members are A.) lesbians and B.) no longer menstruating anyway because of the intense physical training they have to maintain.

[sexobon]

The military doesn't issue pregnancies, they have to bring their own.

[xoxoxoBruce]

The same with self inflicted wounds. The soldier owns it, and must suffer the consequences of it preventing them to do the job.

[Undertoad]

I have a feeling the chicks who would go in for SF would be like the women of a century ago who pooted out the kid in the middle of the rice paddy or wheat field, sat out for a while, had some water and then went on about their job harvesting

[xoxoxoBruce]

True, but that 6 months beforehand would slow them up.

[sexobon]

Won't someone think of the critters. What will happen to them if soldiers have to start carrying field delivered babies in their packs?



More warm fuzzy feeling photos

[xoxoxoBruce]

Yana Gallen, at Northwestern University, has written a paper summing up a study of gender gap in Danish employment. They found women are paid 16% less and are 12% less productive, but have unable to pin down the other 4% other than bias.

One important point, at least to me, was childless women were equally productive with men. I doubt that productivity loss stemmed from showing cow orkers pictures of their kids. Even in a family friendly utopia like Denmark, it's more likely exhaustion and stress, ongoing and accumulative. Days off and holidays bring no respite, just additional pressures, expected duties, and self-recrimination for not living up to the June Cleaver model.

Abstract: Using Danish matched employer-employee data, this paper estimates the relative productivity of men and women and finds that the gender “productivity gap” is 12 percent–seventy five percent of the 16 percent residual pay gap can be accounted for by productivity differences between men and women. I measure the productivity gap by estimating the efficiency units lost in a firm-level production function if a laborer is female, holding other explanatory covariates such as age, education, experience, and hours worked constant.

To study the mechanisms behind the 4 percent gap in pay that is unexplained by productivity, I use data on parenthood and age. Mothers are paid much lower wages than men, but their estimated productivity gap completely explains their pay gap. In contrast, women without children are estimated to be as productive as men but they are not compensated at the same rate as men.

The decoupling of pay and productivity for women without children happens during their prime-child bearing years. I provide estimates of the productivity gap in the cross-section and estimates that account for endogenous sorting of women into less productive firms using a control-function approach inspired by Olley-Pakes.

This paper also provides estimates of the gender productivity gap across industries and occupations. Though the results do vary across industries and occupations, the overall estimate of the productivity gap is fairly robust to the specification of the production function.

The paper can be downloaded as a pdf at the link above.

[DanaC]

Interesting, thanks Bruce.

[DanaC]

Sometimes, organisations really try to do something positive but trip themselves up by not truly understanding the nature of the problem. IBM has been trying to encourage greater female participation in STEM fields. They came up with this gem of a campaign. It's laudable that they are trying, but they clearly are missing huge chunks of the point. I read the article and I was just trying to imagine the strategy meetings for this campaign. I'd love to be a fly on the wall for some of this stuff.

IBM has discontinued a campaign encouraging women to get into technology by asking them to “hack a hairdryer” after widespread criticism from women in the industry.

The company admitted the campaign “missed the mark for some” and apologised.

The campaign, which dated back to October and was part of a wider effort by the company to promote STEM careers, called on women in science and technology to “reengineer what matters in science”.

A video posted on IBM’s YouTube account showed a number of experiments involving hairdryers as a voiceover encourages women to take part:



You, a windblaster and an idea, repurposed for a larger purpose, to support those who believe that it’s not what covers your cranium that counts, but what’s in it. So hack heat, re-reoute airflow, reinvent sound, and imagine a future where the most brilliant minds are solving the world’s biggest problems regardless of your gender.

Yep - because obviously, in order to make science and engineering attractive to women, it must first be translated into something they can relate to: haircare and beauty. On the same spectrum as the makers of science kits for kids who market kits to boys that have them creating model volcanoes and kits to girls that have them exploring the science of perfumes and bubblebath.


Women already in STEM fields were not impressed and took to Twitter. Some of the tweets are great.

@reubenacciano tweeted:

Hey @IBM - Margaret Hamilton was too busy writing code to get us to the moon to f*ck w/ a hairdryer. #HackAHairDryer

@Stephevs43 says:

That's ok @IBM, I'd rather build satellites instead, but good luck with that whole #HackAHairDryer thing.

These two made me laugh:

@minxdragon:

Sorry @IBM i’m too busy working on lipstick chemistry and writing down formulae with little hearts over the i s to #HackAHairDryer

@joalabastar posted a picture of a folded towel with this comment:

Here, @IBM. My lady brain came up with this for #HackAHairDryer. Kuhn would declare it paradigm shifting, surely

But my favourite came from the London Fire Brigade. It's nice to know they're keeping an eye on things:

We're staying out of the sexism debate, however we'd suggest that it's generally a bad idea, & possibly a bit dangerous to #HackAHairDryer

Read the rest here:

http://www.theguardian.com/technolog...aimed-at-women

Good on IBM for trying. Good on them for their swift response. Please do better next time - it does matter. Stop focusing on changing the content to make it relatable for women and start making tech fields more welcoming of women in a way that doesn't make them feel like someone on an exchange trip from Venus.

[Happy Monkey]

"Hack a Heat Gun". In small print - if you don't have a heat gun, you can use a regular household hair dryer.

I especially agree with the London Fire Brigade, though. Using a hair dryer (or heat gun) in an unusual manner might cut off ventilation, or concentrate heat for too long on something that isn't designed for it. And, even more, when I think "hack" I think "open up and take apart", and that gives you exposed AC and heating elements.

Note: I have, in fact, disassembled a hair dryer, though I forget what it was for. And I do have a heat gun.

[Undertoad]

The outrage is now very nearly self-feeding. In the near future we won't need the original campaign.

ETA. In the near future, we won't HAVE the original campaign. Companies will realize that, whatever they do and whatever they say, it will be wildly re-interpreted and then the re-interpretation wildly broadcast over all social media. Therefore they will not do anything at all. Women in STEM? Too controversial. Our official company policy is nothing. Way to go.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I agree, you can't say anything without offending someone, especially on the net where trolls are gleaning everything for something to pounce on.
I can envision them trying to come up with a campaign to persuade teen girls the sciences are cool, and trying to think of something mechanical/electrical most girls would be familiar/comfortable enough with to start envisioning other uses. The chick snapping she was too busy coding obviously was not the target, and foolish to think all girls are on her path.

What would you call it, constraints of the mother? These are the options my mother and her mother had so they must be mine. I guess this is where family encouragement works best, but if nobody in the family has broken out of the box, that's not likely to happen. World war II was the turning point for working women, maybe we need another world war.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

The outrage is now very nearly self-feeding. In the near future we won't need the original campaign.

ETA. In the near future, we won't HAVE the original campaign. Companies will realize that, whatever they do and whatever they say, it will be wildly re-interpreted and then the re-interpretation wildly broadcast over all social media. Therefore they will not do anything at all. Women in STEM? Too controversial. Our official company policy is nothing. Way to go.

Well, that's one way of looking at it. On the other hand, maybe the major companies might start taking on board that when they do this stuff they need to be particularly thoughtful and careful. Is it really such a reach to suggest that maybe the 'girls like hairdressing and fashion so lets get them into science by making it about that' approach might be a bit of an own goal? This stuff been talked about ad nauseum in recent years, for example through the 'Let toys be toys' and 'let books be books' campaings, where science and tech toys in particular were a focus for concern.

It isn't like this stuff is not being talked about. Did nobody in those strategy meetings consider that wider discourse?

As I said, I think it's a really good thing that IBM wants to encourage girls to take up STEM subjects. But actually, what is needed is an approach that reaches children and draws them in and then doesn't put constant cultural and systemic roadblocks in the way of one gender.

Girls are studying STEM subjects in greater numbers than ever. The problem is that it doesn't translate to large numbers of women working in STEM fields, or women progressing to management and leadership in anything like equal numbers to men within those fields.

Look at a bunch of young children being taught about scientific concepts or engaging in physical experiments to learn about the world around them and you'll see no real difference in interest between girls and boys. Somewhere between those early explorations and work in the field the girls drop away. Even where a cohort has taken on higher study in large numbers, between that and Silicon valley, again the girls drop away.

It's the context that needs dealing with, not the content. What puts girls off STEM? All sorts of things, but cultural assumptions that girls naturally have a different set of interests to boys and that science and technology are primarily male, play a part. This campaign attempts to tackle the latter of those, whilst reinforcing the former.

What, in my opinion, would make for a much stronger approach would be to start breaking down those barriers between boys and girls. Because, actually, though we particularly want to encourage girls in order for them to make up a more equal proportion of those going into STEM - we also still need to encourage more boys to go into those fields. Rather than target it at girls, maybe target it at young people in a way that includes girls and boys equally. Or if you're going to particularly target girls, consider the varied interests and proclivities of the girls you're trying to reach.

As a one-off campaign, taken in isolation it's not such a big deal. In the real world, where it does not exist in a vacuum but as part of an ongoing cultural discourse it is. If the leaders of the STEM fields tried to bring more boys into their ranks and the only way they could ever think to reach them was through football, and if every book designed to reach out to boys, and every promotion attempting to draw boys into any subject automatically assumed they were football mad - they'd alienate almost as many boys as they drew in, probably more. If every industry and every field that ever wanted to bring in more boys always focussed on football. It would be ridiculous and reductive.

Is it true lots of girls like hair and make-up? Yep. So, is the way to reach girls through hair and make-up? No. Because girls, even girls who like looking pretty, have more than one interest in their lives. And lots of girls, aren't actually that interested in hair and beauty. It might be a factor in their lives - but it sits there with a bunch of other stuff. Some of which, quite remarkably, crosses over with the boys's interests.

There are lots of ways to reach girls that don't set them into a cultural and emotional silo from boys, subtly reinforcing the notion that girls are essentially different and that their lives revolve around their attractiveness.

It's no good having an overt message of inclusivity and welcome if the subtext reinforces the barriers you're trying to break down.