4 ms·

> If there are complaints about too little women in engineering, why aren’t there complaints about too few men in teaching or humanities? There's no shortage o

> If there are complaints about too little women in engineering, why aren’t there complaints about too few men in teaching or humanities? There's no shortage of men in the humanities, nor in teaching once you get past the lower grade levels. In the US, at least. The point of women in tech advocacy is that there are a variety of forces discouraging women into self-selecting themselves out of careers in technology. One is just the fact that there are so few women in tech to begin with. Another is that barely any can be considered high-profile. Then there are all the historical, cultural, and sociological factors. This sort of advocacy is just an attempt to fight against those forces by establishing greater visibility and precedent for successful women in tech. (As an aside, I think it'd be great if there were more female engineers in the dating pool.)

_delirium 16y ago
> There's no shortage of men in the humanities, nor in teaching once you get past the lower grade levels. In the US, at least. That's true currently, but only because of very long cycles, I think: there are still plenty of male professors in the humanities today who got their PhDs in the 1960s and 70s, when all of academia was male-dominated. But men make up around a 40%-and-declining proportion of new non-science/eng PhDs, which is actually not much better than the women in science/eng numbers (women make up about a 35%-and-rising proportion of new science/eng PhDs). In some fields it's closer to 25%, since that 40% of men getting humanities PhDs are strongly clustered in a handful of fields (like philosophy, which is still male-dominated). I think things are going to look quite interesting in 20-30 years once the current crop of older profs retires.
- dieterrams 16y ago
  That's just PhDs, though. What are the percentages for new profs?
  - _delirium 16y ago
    That's an interesting question, and in a bit of searching just now I wasn't able to find any good data. I'd love to see an estimate of gender-% for new prof hires per field across all U.S. universities, for some recent period.

_delirium 16y ago

> There's no shortage of men in the humanities, nor in teaching once you get past the lower grade levels. In the US, at least. That's true currently, but only because of very long cycles, I think: there are still plenty of male professors in the humanities today who got their PhDs in the 1960s and 70s, when all of academia was male-dominated. But men make up around a 40%-and-declining proportion of new non-science/eng PhDs, which is actually not much better than the women in science/eng numbers (women make up about a 35%-and-rising proportion of new science/eng PhDs). In some fields it's closer to 25%, since that 40% of men getting humanities PhDs are strongly clustered in a handful of fields (like philosophy, which is still male-dominated). I think things are going to look quite interesting in 20-30 years once the current crop of older profs retires.

dieterrams 16y ago
That's just PhDs, though. What are the percentages for new profs?
- _delirium 16y ago
  That's an interesting question, and in a bit of searching just now I wasn't able to find any good data. I'd love to see an estimate of gender-% for new prof hires per field across all U.S. universities, for some recent period.