5 ms·

I'm not making a pro or con judgement but it does help future women/minorities for current women/minorities to break glass ceilings and get into new industries/

by pfisch 4y ago

I'm not making a pro or con judgement but it does help future women/minorities for current women/minorities to break glass ceilings and get into new industries/positions. Just like the first black kids sent to white only schools during integration helped make things less terrible for future minorities.

aliqot 4y ago
This falls apart because it quickly becomes a question of who are the accepted minority classes, as we see certain groups being excluded.
- unclebucknasty 4y ago
  >quickly becomes a question of who are the accepted minority classes This is only a dilemma if you completely ignore the history that precipitated such efforts.
germandiago 4y ago
What is the glass ceiling? In Norway years back they promoted a program for women to study engineering disciplines. They increased a lot. So at some point they thought they could stop doing it and percentages came back to where they were before after some time I recall. If it was a cultural thing... they would have stayed. On the way u had discrimination by sex (AFAIK men were not paid for choosing engineering and women were paid FOR choosing, a privilege under any circumstance since noone forbid them to choose that). All in all what happened is that some ppl saw a chance (incentive) in dtudying cheaper or whatever. But was the real reason to choose those degrees bc they really liked it? I really think promoting good stuff is nice. But distorting it via positive discrimination is not the solution.
- em-bee 4y ago
  i know nothing about what happened there in norway, so what i say is pure speculation. if i understand you correctly part of the program was financial support. so once that support went away, the numbers went back. sounds to me that, all other things being equal, the program was not able to change the culture. and that includes possible ongoing discrimination against women, only that the financial support helped some women to enter engineering despite the discrimination happening. it is possible that this program was the wrong approach. (where it comes to discrimination, i believe it matters to teach everyone to change their attitude towards women in engineering) or that it simply wasn't active long enough. it takes time to change peoples attitudes. maybe after a few decades people get used to women in engineering. (that worked in china, they have a lot more women in engineering) the problem with liking it is that it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the field at hand. i may love programming, but i hate working in a bro-culture, and that alone would be enough to rather work in a job that i don't like where the people are nice than the reverse.
  - germandiago 4y ago
    > if i understand you correctly part of the program was financial support. so once that support went away, the numbers went back. Yes, that is what happened. > sounds to me that, all other things being equal, the program was not able to change the culture This reminds me of "we did not try hard enough, we need more intervention". I am not a proponent of it. The culture was not changed probably because there is more than just culture underlying human choice... at least that is my belief. Of course, not all is biology, but not all is culture. It seems that in this case things tend to indicate that there is more than culture behind these choices. > it is possible that this program was the wrong approach why not just convince people why they should choose X or Y? Why you have to reserve money or resources actively? That, you know, means that some people that are more valuable than others, will lose their chance... is not that discrimination? Is it not that what they are fighting? You do not fight discrimination by promoting it from another side... > i may love programming, but i hate working in a bro-culture Oh, and in teaching it does not happen the opposite? I might not like in a sis culture, right? I mean, the problem exists... no, the problem does not. Things are the way they are and we can encourage people to change them if they want, not by shifting the cost to others. If you work somewhere, you cannot pretend the world will change immediately around you just bc we think it should be something different. We need to deal with that, and trying to force everything into our ideal just leads to frustration. Instead we should analyze real causes for things and why they happen or will keep happening instead of fighting them by transferring costs to people that have nothing to do with the problem.
    - em-bee 4y ago
      "we did not try hard enough, we need more intervention". I am not a proponent of it. then why try at all? if we believe this goal should be achived then we should keep trying until we get there. You do not fight discrimination by promoting it from another side that is a reasonable argument, but plenty of counter arguments exist. some are being discussed on this page. Oh, and in teaching it does not happen the opposite? oh sure, however, teaching is an entirely different problem. as a parent i want my children to be exposed to male and female role models (what teachers are to them) in equal measure. therefore for the sake of children i want gender parity in schools to be enforced by law. but you could make the same argument with other professions that are dominated by one gender. nurses are probably a good example where men may not feel comfortable. we can encourage people to change them if they want, not by shifting the cost to others why not? one question is, what goal do we want to achieve. the other question is, how do we achieve it? what we want is gender equality, that is equality of opportunity (not necessarily equality of outcome) so that means we want more opportunities for women in engineering. for that we need to understand what is keeping women out of engineering, and how can we get more women into engineering. (and then replay that for any profession and respective gender) and if access to financial resources is a reason, then it absolutely makes sense to provide additional financial resources to women. again, i have no idea what happened in norway. access to university is free in norway, so i don't know what they would need money for. if discrimination by men is what keeps women out of engineering, then what we need to do is to get men to change. how do we get them to change? possibly only by exposing men to more female coworkers. but that means forcing the issue, and pushing women into engineering until men learn to treat women as equals. i don't care about gender balance in engineering or any other profession (except teaching), but i strongly care about women and men being treated equally, and a large part of that is men learning to treat women as their equal and respect them professionally. we should analyze real causes for things and why they happen or will keep happening instead of fighting them by transferring costs to people that have nothing to do with the problem you are saying that as if it were a contradiction. yes of course we need to analyze the real causes. but we also need to find an approach to solve the problem.
phpisthebest 4y ago
>>Just like the first black kids sent to white only schools during integration helped make things less terrible for future minorities. it is nothing like that for 3 reasons 1. first and foremost the "white only" schools was legally required segregation, it was imposed by law and the elimination of that required law to reverse. These laws have now been absent for decades 2. Primary education is where this battle should be fought, even today there are still battle that need to be fought when it come to resource alloation, school choice, etc. You do not attempt to fix a bad casting after the poor you need to fix the mold.... We do that by fixing primary education which is being used by various political factions on both the left and the right to push political agenda and not education. 3. Once we get to adulthood, using discrimination to "fix" historic discrimination will not resolve the underlying problem (see #2) and will likely create more discrimination against the very groups you are attempting to assist, it is in all cases a general net negative.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Regarding 1, even after whites-only schools became illegal, little changed. Previously legally whites-only schools stayed in-practice whites-only, often with explicit discrimination by racist parents and teachers to discourage any black people from sending or keeping their children in the school, but other times simply as by-product of housing inequality. It was hard for people in a black neighborhood - itself created by now-defunct discriminatory laws that had huge long-term impact - to send their children to a school in a farther away white neighborhood. The fix was to forcibly integrate schools: explicitly mandate not just that black students be allowed, but actually that they are integrated in significant numbers, including by providing special facilities (school buses) to take them to the better schools that were farther away from their homes - the policy known as "busing" [0]; a form of (positive) discrimination. Of course, as the article notes, this can also have negative consequences, so any such measure is far from easy to apply. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing
  - phpisthebest 4y ago
    I understand that, which is why today I 100% support back pack funding of schools. I despise the idea of Regional school districts, and really the fact that most schools are funded by local very tiny regional property tax districts, making some schools VERY VERY well funded to the point where high schools are building professional sports arena's and other districts just a few miles away can not afford proper computers.

by pfisch 4y ago

aliqot 4y ago

This falls apart because it quickly becomes a question of who are the accepted minority classes, as we see certain groups being excluded.

unclebucknasty 4y ago
>quickly becomes a question of who are the accepted minority classes This is only a dilemma if you completely ignore the history that precipitated such efforts.

germandiago 4y ago

What is the glass ceiling? In Norway years back they promoted a program for women to study engineering disciplines. They increased a lot. So at some point they thought they could stop doing it and percentages came back to where they were before after some time I recall. If it was a cultural thing... they would have stayed. On the way u had discrimination by sex (AFAIK men were not paid for choosing engineering and women were paid FOR choosing, a privilege under any circumstance since noone forbid them to choose that). All in all what happened is that some ppl saw a chance (incentive) in dtudying cheaper or whatever. But was the real reason to choose those degrees bc they really liked it? I really think promoting good stuff is nice. But distorting it via positive discrimination is not the solution.

em-bee 4y ago
i know nothing about what happened there in norway, so what i say is pure speculation. if i understand you correctly part of the program was financial support. so once that support went away, the numbers went back. sounds to me that, all other things being equal, the program was not able to change the culture. and that includes possible ongoing discrimination against women, only that the financial support helped some women to enter engineering despite the discrimination happening. it is possible that this program was the wrong approach. (where it comes to discrimination, i believe it matters to teach everyone to change their attitude towards women in engineering) or that it simply wasn't active long enough. it takes time to change peoples attitudes. maybe after a few decades people get used to women in engineering. (that worked in china, they have a lot more women in engineering) the problem with liking it is that it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the field at hand. i may love programming, but i hate working in a bro-culture, and that alone would be enough to rather work in a job that i don't like where the people are nice than the reverse.
- germandiago 4y ago
  > if i understand you correctly part of the program was financial support. so once that support went away, the numbers went back. Yes, that is what happened. > sounds to me that, all other things being equal, the program was not able to change the culture This reminds me of "we did not try hard enough, we need more intervention". I am not a proponent of it. The culture was not changed probably because there is more than just culture underlying human choice... at least that is my belief. Of course, not all is biology, but not all is culture. It seems that in this case things tend to indicate that there is more than culture behind these choices. > it is possible that this program was the wrong approach why not just convince people why they should choose X or Y? Why you have to reserve money or resources actively? That, you know, means that some people that are more valuable than others, will lose their chance... is not that discrimination? Is it not that what they are fighting? You do not fight discrimination by promoting it from another side... > i may love programming, but i hate working in a bro-culture Oh, and in teaching it does not happen the opposite? I might not like in a sis culture, right? I mean, the problem exists... no, the problem does not. Things are the way they are and we can encourage people to change them if they want, not by shifting the cost to others. If you work somewhere, you cannot pretend the world will change immediately around you just bc we think it should be something different. We need to deal with that, and trying to force everything into our ideal just leads to frustration. Instead we should analyze real causes for things and why they happen or will keep happening instead of fighting them by transferring costs to people that have nothing to do with the problem.
  - em-bee 4y ago
    "we did not try hard enough, we need more intervention". I am not a proponent of it. then why try at all? if we believe this goal should be achived then we should keep trying until we get there. You do not fight discrimination by promoting it from another side that is a reasonable argument, but plenty of counter arguments exist. some are being discussed on this page. Oh, and in teaching it does not happen the opposite? oh sure, however, teaching is an entirely different problem. as a parent i want my children to be exposed to male and female role models (what teachers are to them) in equal measure. therefore for the sake of children i want gender parity in schools to be enforced by law. but you could make the same argument with other professions that are dominated by one gender. nurses are probably a good example where men may not feel comfortable. we can encourage people to change them if they want, not by shifting the cost to others why not? one question is, what goal do we want to achieve. the other question is, how do we achieve it? what we want is gender equality, that is equality of opportunity (not necessarily equality of outcome) so that means we want more opportunities for women in engineering. for that we need to understand what is keeping women out of engineering, and how can we get more women into engineering. (and then replay that for any profession and respective gender) and if access to financial resources is a reason, then it absolutely makes sense to provide additional financial resources to women. again, i have no idea what happened in norway. access to university is free in norway, so i don't know what they would need money for. if discrimination by men is what keeps women out of engineering, then what we need to do is to get men to change. how do we get them to change? possibly only by exposing men to more female coworkers. but that means forcing the issue, and pushing women into engineering until men learn to treat women as equals. i don't care about gender balance in engineering or any other profession (except teaching), but i strongly care about women and men being treated equally, and a large part of that is men learning to treat women as their equal and respect them professionally. we should analyze real causes for things and why they happen or will keep happening instead of fighting them by transferring costs to people that have nothing to do with the problem you are saying that as if it were a contradiction. yes of course we need to analyze the real causes. but we also need to find an approach to solve the problem.

phpisthebest 4y ago

>>Just like the first black kids sent to white only schools during integration helped make things less terrible for future minorities. it is nothing like that for 3 reasons 1. first and foremost the "white only" schools was legally required segregation, it was imposed by law and the elimination of that required law to reverse. These laws have now been absent for decades 2. Primary education is where this battle should be fought, even today there are still battle that need to be fought when it come to resource alloation, school choice, etc. You do not attempt to fix a bad casting after the poor you need to fix the mold.... We do that by fixing primary education which is being used by various political factions on both the left and the right to push political agenda and not education. 3. Once we get to adulthood, using discrimination to "fix" historic discrimination will not resolve the underlying problem (see #2) and will likely create more discrimination against the very groups you are attempting to assist, it is in all cases a general net negative.

tsimionescu 4y ago
Regarding 1, even after whites-only schools became illegal, little changed. Previously legally whites-only schools stayed in-practice whites-only, often with explicit discrimination by racist parents and teachers to discourage any black people from sending or keeping their children in the school, but other times simply as by-product of housing inequality. It was hard for people in a black neighborhood - itself created by now-defunct discriminatory laws that had huge long-term impact - to send their children to a school in a farther away white neighborhood. The fix was to forcibly integrate schools: explicitly mandate not just that black students be allowed, but actually that they are integrated in significant numbers, including by providing special facilities (school buses) to take them to the better schools that were farther away from their homes - the policy known as "busing" [0]; a form of (positive) discrimination. Of course, as the article notes, this can also have negative consequences, so any such measure is far from easy to apply. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desegregation_busing
- phpisthebest 4y ago
  I understand that, which is why today I 100% support back pack funding of schools. I despise the idea of Regional school districts, and really the fact that most schools are funded by local very tiny regional property tax districts, making some schools VERY VERY well funded to the point where high schools are building professional sports arena's and other districts just a few miles away can not afford proper computers.