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Re: Where Have All the Boys Gone?



What I expected to be a brief comment on my part has turned into a
long entry, so I apologize in advance for the length, but these are
my wandering 2 cents...

Doug Craigen wrote:

In short, I thought I had good reason for confidence
about my career..... Then 1993 hit, my 2 year contract ended, and the
bubble burst. Since then my "academic career" has consisted of
occasional sessional teaching. A variety of things converged
simultaneously, but one of them was the high fraction of posted jobs
which I couldn't even apply for because I am a male.

Can you elaborate? I mean, all off-the-cuff gender comments aside,
this is technically illegal, is it not? What types of technical jobs
are -truly- female only? And, did you somehow feel that the legal
system was also against you, to the extent that you just felt like
walking away from it and not fighting? I'm not trolling here, just
trying to understand this better.

Its harder to
assess the impact of "the U of ... is an equal opportunity / affirmative
action employer" (a contradiction of terms), but I have been told off
the record many times that my only problem is being a white male.

Can you elaborate again? Was it a case that there were plenty of
qualified female applicants; or did they also tell you off the record
(directly or in so many words) that they would actually rather the
positions go unfilled than hire you?

Your comments are seriously disturbing (no doubt to you more than
anyone!), as would be any similar comments made by women with the
gender turned around.

I've
always been a supporter of the idea that our culture made it easier for
me as a white male to aspire to and succeed in science early on in life,
and this should be addressed in the hiring process. I should have to
prove myself a bit more because others had to overcome greater odds just
to compete against me. However, it seems that it is men of my
generation who received relatively little initial advantage from being
male who are shouldering most of the burden for achieving 'equity',
while men who grew up in a male dominated era have given up relatively
little of their career advancement to women.

I admit to not really understanding where you are coming from here :-)

The thesis of this thread took me quite by surprise. I fully admit
that I am a "victim" perhaps of media hype about the "sorrowful"
state of women in employment and education. The original web page and
post only cited women in higher education, but speculated on the
potential impact in science-related fields. Even though I apparently
have not questioned media hype as much as I should, I still have
firmly believed that people should make it on merit and not gender,
and will continue to do so.

My long-term background is not so much academic. My undergraduate
days were in the late 70s. I then worked in industry in the 80s but
had close academic ties for 5 years of that decade. The first half of
the 90s was physics graduate school, and the second half has been
100% industry with few academic ties. I've been through all this in
three distinctly different geographical regions of the USA. So even
though I have not had a strong teaching background, I've had a
not-so-bad mix of academic and industrial exposure.

And what I can say throughout it all is that women have been
relatively non-existent. For a good *20* years now, that's what I
observe, and this is why the apparent facts of this topic have so
surprised me. In my school settings, any women who were around were
in biology and some chemistry and engineering, but physics and math
were gender jokes. And I can make a strong statement that in
industry, where I have not only worked but also had experience
reviewing resumes and contributing to hiring decisions, we often
couldn't find women under any circumstances (despite being lectured
to by equal-opportunity personnel depts). I never saw evidence that
we looked based on gender, but what could we do? Resumes from women
were very rare indeed. I once found myself staring across the table
at a new-hire candidate (male) that I had gone to school with 10
years before and 1500 mi away. We hadn't talked and had no idea where
each other was the entire time until he just happened to show up. It
was such an improbable event that it will likely never happen to me
again in my lifetime and probably shouldn't have that one time. And
yet while I was in that same job (4 years) I never -once- found
myself asked to help interview a female candidate. There was no
gender-bias here; they were virtually non-existent.

Most recently (2 years ago), my present company put out the search
for a B.S. level person. Good job involving a mix of physics,
electronics, and computer background, but certainly not extensive
expertise required in any of the 3 areas (we were willing to train).
Out of 20 or so resumes received, only one was a woman, and she had
an odd habit of communicating with us only from a public phone booth
(it was hard to contact her). This is off-topic, but what really got
to me about that hiring experience was not that there was only one
woman (I frankly didn't blink an eye at that), but that it was such a
motley crew, complete with misspellings on resumes, missed
appointments, or showing up for interviews in shorts and t-shirts (we
can save all that for another discussion). Again, the point is that I
saw absolutely nothing that made me think anything was different
w.r.t. women in science (IOW, they still weren't coming down the
technology pike).

These days I do more computer technology than physics, as some of my
previous posts have betrayed. And these days, unlike any time before,
I have had a number of serious collaborations with people whom I have
never met. I have consummated entire projects, following them through
to the result and reporting or publishing stage, entirely by e-mail
and a little telephone. And with this I have thought more than ever
before that in these kind of exchanges gender would exhibit a minimal
to nonexistent role. But what do I find? My private and public
on-line technology exchanges (open-source software development being
an excellent example) are absolutely dominated by men, almost
ludicrously so. As is evidenced on this list at times, there are more
women lurkers than we realize. But lurkers, although probably great
learners, are not contributors. And despite valid complaints that we
tend to be acerbic at times, thus discouraging women from joining in,
the fact remains that as technology contributors in a number of
fields, women seem to be relatively non-existent.

So, faced with the "facts" of this discussion, I openly admit I just
don't get this at all. If since 1979 or so (as shown by the original
chart), women have been noticeably outgrowing men in higher
education, where are they? Or does this information really have
-nothing- to do with science fields? Or are women indeed in science
fields, having simply taken all the university science jobs so that
people like Doug can't get a break under any circumstances, and so
people like me never see them come to the commercial technology field
(except maybe as a marketing or sales person)?

I for one can't wait for these smart and motivated women to enter the
technology work force. I get tired of being subjected to the mass of
relatively uneducated "dumb boys" with poor spelling and
communication skills. And if my son's generation (17 now) is any
evidence of things to come, God help me, cause I can't take the cocky
attitude, the belief that Nintendo prepares you for anything, and
that they should get whatever they want without earning it (yet
another discussion - I try to sooth myself by thinking how long-term
my employment potential is).

Perhaps I am way way off base with my cynicism, and my experience is
just not typical. Perhaps so, but I'd also be just as shocked to find
that my experiences are not common. I would prefer to not be cynical,
and I am certainly NOT trying to step on anyone's toes here,
regardless of gender. Maybe this is simply a matter of these women
just not coming out of the pipe yet, and the next decade will be much
more promising in this area.

Again, sorry for the long and rambling prose.


Stefan Jeglinski