You’ve said this with such absolute resolve and I’m just curious. I can understand not wanting to give people advantages they haven’t earned. But why is it wrong to recruit people to a field? That’s what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about retaining people to the exclusion of others. I’m talking about simply keeping them from dropping it out.
Good. I’m not either.
OK, but does this particular qualification outweigh 5 publications or two years of teaching experience? Would it still be inappropriate to hire the woman candidate even if she wasn’t president of an organization?
I have an anecdote that relates to this scenario sorta kinda. Last semester a bunch of job candidates came in. All of them were stellar, but it was obvious some were more desirable than others. There were two front-runners–a male and a female–that everyone loved. Naturally, the graduate students (almost all of whom are women) preferred the female candidate. We wanted her because not only was her research fascinating, but because it would be cool to have a female professor to work with. Nothing against men, but sometimes it’s cool to have someone like you in leadership positions.
Ends up the female candidate was given a better offer somewhere and we ended up with guy. Are we sad? No. But do I wish we had offered the woman what she had wanted? Am I wrong for wanting another woman on the faculty? Maybe.
Was the woman’s skill “reaching out to female students”? Was it the simple fact that she had a vagina? Would it have been unfair to the male candidate to hire her because the female graduate students are in dire need of a role model? These kinds of questions call for a position that’s not “absurdly simple”.
Well, I’m a scientist too, and I have observed many instances of women (and minorities) working harder. My observations are not enough to discount yours, but I have presented evidence of overachievement of women in school. Unless you are seeing concomitant overachievement in the workplace that I’m not seeing (and you have supportive data), I still don’t know why you would doubt the assertion that women work harder than men but don’t get all the glory.
I guess I should ask what you mean by merit then? Is merit all about grades and test scores? Is it only about objective criteria? Is it based on subjective criteria, like letters of recommendation and workplace evaluations? Is it a combination of the above?
Personally, I think “merit” is a combination of objective and subjective criteria. The first is easy to judge, but how about the second? And how should the two be balanced in any given situation? The fact that the last question is hard to answer is what makes meritocracy a myth.
True. A white guy can teach black kids as good or better than a black woman. But if I’m in situation where I have to hire a teacher for black children who have never seen people like them in leadership positions, then I’m going to see “brown skin” as an intangible. Whether or not it outweighs the other stuff depends on the quality of the other stuff.
You seem to think that decisions always come down to “qualified” and “unqualified”. Sometimes it comes down to “qualified in this way” and “qualified in that way”. And the “way” that’s more important at any given time is sometimes independent of the person’s character.
Because I don’t see what awesome “intangibles” men have that would justify ignoring piss-poor academic qualifications. Perhaps if we could learn what these intangibles are, then women could develop them too and put their good grades to use.
The number of men entering my field (vet medicine) has dropped precipitously. Interestingly enough, this decrease is concomittant with the increasing competitiveness of vet school admission programs. Out of a class of 59, only 8 men graduated from my class. Eight. Medical schools and other health professions are seeing the same trend. I predict that in another twenty years, less than a third of all practicing veterinarians will be male. Perhaps there will be a day when veterinarians and physicians will be as predominately female as nursing and teaching are today.
Makes me wonder where all the men are going. The computer field? Business? I don’t know.
by CrazyCatLady:
I don’t know why you were so quick to jump to Neurotik’s defense (while being needlessly snarky to monstro), when he clearly did not put his argument in terms of overall teaching effectiveness as you seem to think he did. He made it an issue of gender “out-reach” by saying :
So I don’t understand your basis for accusing monstro of deliberately misunderstanding what Neutrotik wrote. Deliberate misunderstanding would entail pretending the “male” in bold was actually “all”, IMO.
Now as for whether I think there should be AA for men. Yes, in some situations. AA doesn’t always mean that a candidate with a 4.0 GPA will be upstaged by someone with a 2.5. If the school already has a large majority of women and many of the students lack strong male role models (and are paying the price for it), with all objective criteria being equal between the male and female candidate, I think it makes sense for the school to pick the man over the woman. In my eyes, the decision is perfectly ethical and moral, and most importantly, practical. Since so many fathers are opting out of parental responsbility these days, it may be good for kids to have a Mr. Kotter figure to look up to once in a while.
My selection may seem unfair to people who think such decisions should come down to a coin toss or a game of eenie-meenie-minnie-moe, but I don’t see why it is more fair (or moral) to pretend that “inherent intangibles” are always irrelevant job qualities.
I think I may have misunderstood your example somewhat, for which I apologize. Here’s my take on it, for what it’s worth.
I think it’s bad policy to focus on spending extra money to recruit people or to try to retain people on the basis of criteria which have no relevance. I think it’s a waste of the taxpayer’s money, and I think it’s divisive. Why, after all, should it make a shred of difference whether an engineer has a Y chromosome or not? I can’t see any reason that it makes any difference at all, and as such, I don’t know how one justifies wasting the taxpayer’s money to recruit someone who has a pair of X chromosomes solely on the basis of this person having a pair of X chromosomes. It’s essentially the same problem as with a good ol’ boy’s network. It is, in some way, giving them an advantage that they haven’t earned, just like the good ol’ boy’s network gives other people an advantage they haven’t earned.
That said, I don’t have anywhere near the issues with that as I do with making having a pair of X chromosomes an actual qualification.
To the first question, I suspect it probably doesn’t. Subjective criteria matter, but objective criteria matter more. But of course, the importance of heading this national orgainzation depends heavily on things like the importance of the national organization, the duties of the president, the effectiveness this woman displayed in doing her job, and so on. If we find that this woman gave an extra 30 hours/week to her duties as president, and was prepared to give them up, that subjective criterion became a lot more important, for example, because it suggests that if she was almost as qualified academically but had a whole second career to boot, she’s quite probably a harder worker and at least as good a scholar.
To the second question, if the only difference between the two candidates is that one is male with 5 extra papers and 2 extra years of experience, and one is female, then yes, it’s inappropriate to hire the female, because the only reason for doing so would be because she’s female. If there are additional factors (for instance, the math department is having a hard time teaching women because they don’t have people who can relate to women around), then those additional factors need to be considered as well.
You’re not wrong at all for wanting another woman on the faculty, IMHO, if this woman was better able to “reach out to female students,” and there was a dearth of ability on the faculty’s part to do so. This would absolutely be a point in her favor.
If, of course, you wanted the woman simply because she was a woman and not because she was better able to relate to the female graduate students, then you were valuing her based on criteria which had nothing to do with her ability to do her job, and that’s not right. The distinction may well be slight enough so as to verge on meaninglessness, but it’s philosophically important to me.
So I think my position is indeed “absurdly simple.” It’s just rather incredibly difficult to implement. I’m saying that you need to ask the tough questions, you need to answer the tough questions, and you need to let those answers guide your decision.
Is this easy to do? No, it isn’t. Is it a simple concept? Yes, it is. That’s what I meant by describing it as absurdly simple. Sorry if there was confusion.
Work harder? Quite possibly. Don’t get all the glory? Most likely. Work twice as hard? I continue to be skeptical. Sorry. This isn’t a major thing to argue about, of course. My point is just that, to make a sweeping generalization, sweeping generalizations about people are bad things. And silly sweeping generalizations about people are beneath us.
To give a conceptually simple but practically useless definition, merit consists of all those things which enhance one’s abilitiy to perform a given task. Knowledge, communications skills, work ethic, and so on are all examples of merit.
By the way, IMO, grades and test scores are actually not merit at all. Grades and test scores are indicators of merit, but they are in and of themselves not qualifications. The same holds for letters of recommendation, workplace evaluations, and so forth. I think you and I would agree on this point, but on the off chance that we don’t, I wanted to get that out of the way.
Subjective criteria are, of course, more difficult to judge. Fortunately, I also believe they’re less important. The last question is hard to answer, I agree. This doesn’t mean meritocracy is a myth, this just means meritocracy is hard.
Since subjective criteria will be weighted subjectively, people will differ on decisions, by the way. I’m absolutely not saying that in a meritocracy everyone will agree on all hiring decisions. But in a meritocracy, the person who makes those hiring decisions should make them solely upon the basis of what he or she considers merit. Also, of course, if someone has a particularly warped view of merit (“no, really, being 6’ tall, weighing 125 pounds, with curly blonde hair, massive knockers, and the IQ of a turnip is a qualification to be my secretary!”), one would hope that this person is not in a position to make important decisions.
Seeing on preview that we’re cross-posting, I’ll get to your other post as well.
I do see where you’re coming from, and I agree to a large extent. What you want, I think, is for this teacher to not only teach the kids academic lessons, but life lessons. Fine, I agree. If I interpret you correctly, you think that a valuable life lesson to black children is that blacks can succeed too. Fine, I agree. If I interpret you correctly, you feel that one way of teaching them this lesson is to give them an example. Fine, I agree.
However, the “brown skin” isn’t the qualification per se, it’s the ability to teach this lesson. If, of course, there’s a white who can somehow (and I don’t claim this is possible) teach them the same lesson with the same efficacy, then he or she is, for this purpose, equally qualified.
No, I think that decisions always should come down to “best qualified to do the job we want done, considering every particular.” The person who is best qualified to do the job may not be best qualified to do any one part of the job, of course. To use your above example, if you have two teachers, one of whom is smart as a whip but white, and the other of whom is as dumb as a box of rocks but is black, they both have qualifications (both of them can teach some lessons you want taught), but the white is presumably better qualified. Unless the most important thing about this job is teaching black kids that they, too, can succeed, in which case the black is presumably better qualified.
Of course different people will be qualified in different ways, and you must weigh these qualifications for yourself. If you do so in a way which I consider to be perverse, expect to hear about it. Equally, if I do in a way which you consider to be perverse, by all means call me on it. In such a way is civilized society run.
I don’t see such awesome intangibles either, of course. And I strongly doubt they exist. If, by some miracle of an unjust creation, these intangibles do exist, then, well, them’s the breaks, I’m afraid.
Neurotik,
I apologize for trying to establish that we agree on some things. I didn’t know that stating as much was the same as putting words in your mouth. I’m sorry for such a giant faux pas.
Goodness, I got shat on when I disagreed with you. I get shit on when I’m being nice to you. Fly off the handle much?
I’m through with you too because I’m afraid of you.
And I appreciate g8rguy for holding a civil discussion with me. That’s really gr8t
Yes, it was wrong for me to put a quantity like “twice” in a generalization. Sorry.
I guess this is what makes me kind of confused about your argument, so please bear with me. Who in their right mind would hire someone that they didn’t think had merit? Aren’t candidates usually hired based on the criteria the “higher ups” set as merit?
I always thought a meritocracy was knowing that your success was due to your abilities and skills, not because of who you know, who you are related to, and what you look like. If an employer decides “what you look like” is important and thus turns “looks” into a merit, are you saying this is still a meritocracy? Because I don’t think it is.
I think I hear what you saying now (sorta kinda). If an employer doesn’t want “looks” to be a merit, they shouldn’t have to be forced to do so(i.e., they shouldn’t be forced to use AA). But if they want to or if theyrel able to demonstrate that it affects job performance, it’s okay. Or maybe I just need more claification.
My ambivalence with AA comes from something you brought up. I can think of a number of cases when the “looks” of your workforce are intangibles. For instance, in education, where role models are important. But in most cases, “looks” don’t matter at all. Background, personal experiences, and education matter, but the “role model” bit doesn’t. Diversity for the sake of diversity is not good. But if I believe this, does it mean that I don’t think diversity never matters. I don’t think so.
My position is pretty much that anything and everything which the employer can reasonably argue to be a job qualification can and should be considered in making a hire, and that things which the employer cannot reasonably argue to be a job qualification shouldn’t be considered at all.
So if Bob Employer wants to make something a qualification just because it makes him feel all warm and fuzzy inside, I take issue with that. On the other hand, if he can show that this thing which makes him feel all warm and fuzzy inside is actually relevant to Jane Employee’s performance, the Bob not only can but should consider it. The key is being able to reasonably show that the things you’re considering are really actually qualifications for the ability to do the job, however you’ve defined it. And that makes it a meritocracy, because you’re being judged strictly on your merits. Admittedly, it’s a subjective judgment, but I see no way around that.
Oh, and I, too, very much appreciate how this thread has been, by and large, free of the rancor that goes on in so many AA threads. It has indeed been a refreshing change! I have a phone call to make in about 10 minutes, but I’ll be back tomorrow, so…
I’m not very good with Math concepts and I was hoping someone would be kind enough to tell me how the ethnicity factor works with regard to skewed results. Thanks.
The gap between boys and girls is large in black and latino communities. It’s probably larger than the gap between white boys and girls. If we’re looking at all boys and girls the gap is going to be bigger than if we’re looking at only white girls and boys. But the gap is still there (one of the articles I linked to stated that it was an international thing). The fact that it is greater in historically oppressed minority groups does not make it a racial issue, just like poverty isn’t a minority issue just because it’s disproportionately represented in minority communities. Is the performance gap substantial among poor whites? I dunno. Notice that no one suggested we ignore poor people in the stats (which would make more sense, since they comprise more than 25% of the population). Hence, my annoyance.
Thanks Monstro. I couldn’t tell whether that aspect of the debate was about the gap in actual numbers or the gap in performance. It doesn’t seem like the ethnicity factor could skew a gap in the number of women vs the number of men in college. Please, correct me if I am wrong on that assumption.
I’m a student at a university. At my school, the skewed results in terms of numbers is evident. I’ve only had one class where the ratio was close to 50/50 in (out of 6 courses). In most of my classes, there are three women for every man. The ethnicity factor is in play, as there are very few black or hispanic men. Of course, some of this can be attributed to my area of study, which is English. I’m not sure what the numbers look like in the hard sciences.
Interestingly, the education department works in conjuction with the english department to make sure the teachers coming out of IU are at the top of their game in terms of reading and writing skills, and I’ve noticed a much higher ratio of men in the education department when compared with the english department (anecdotally speaking).
I think, in the hard sciences, the picture is rather different, although I tend to define the “hard sciences” so narrowly as to probably diverge from what it actually means. But in physics as an undergrad, it was 90% male. In physics as a grad student, that’s probably closer to 95%. Math as an undergrad was about the same. Chemistry was 75% male. As a grad student, while I was in chemistry, it was probably closer to 66% male.
My impression has tended to be that in the humanities, the gap is very evident, while in hard sciences and engineering and whatnot, men have been hugely over-represented. I don’t know about softer sciences, but I suspect the gap is evident there, but certainly not to the extent it might be in, say, history.
I’m getting my Ph.D in biology, but my field is ecology. Ecology has long been the bastion of males, and there is still the “good ole boy” network at work there. I think the dominance of females as graduate students has been a fairly recent thing. From the 80s on back, my advisor’s graduate students were almost all male. She started seeing more and more females starting in the 90s.
Biology isn’t really a soft science. Ecology and evolution are math-and theory-heavy, and molecular/cellular biology is technology-heavy. The stuff in between-organismal biology–can also be technical and mathematical, depending on the research. There is not much “touchy-feeliness” in biology, although its application to the real world is much more obvious than, say, astrophysics. I don’t think it’s the math stuff that necessarily scares off women. I think it’s the esoteric nature of the “hard” sciences that keeps most people, but especially women, away.
Yeah, I just don’t really know anything about biology students, since I didn’t hand out with the biologists at college. Most of that is that I had no life (not like much has changed), but part of that is the “snobby physicist” thing. It’s pretty awful, really.
You have a point about the esoteric nature being a disinsentive, I think, although at least in physics, you do get a lot of people who do the entire “wow, that’s neat” thing, in talking about black holes and cosmology and all the rest, and a fair number of those seem to want to do physics until they realize just how much math there really is, at which point they back out and choose something else. I’m certain that, in my particular field (and I’ll make no broader claims than that), the math is a strong disinsentive for everyone, men and women alike. It’s just that because, independently, women are also told that they can’t do math, it makes it that much harder to attract women to the field.
Really, of course, I see no reason that women can’t do physics or math or chemistry or biology or any of the rest of the hard sciences. There are certainly some forms of societal pressure that keep them out, don’t you think?
I don’t know. Maybe. I know the “mad scientist geek” stereotype is applied more to men than to women, so a woman considering a “geekish” field may feel more out of place in that kind of environment.
Do women geeks get dates? (I try not to look at my own life as representative of anything) Would a guy find a female nerd attractive?
Also, I wonder if the labeling of sciences as “soft” and “hard” contributes to some this. What guy wants to be a “softie”? And if a girl is unsure of her strengths in math and analytical thinking, she may think a “softer” science is more up her alley.
I think the differences between males and females are downplayed. Men and women think differently, and we ask different types of questions. It may be more natural for a female to want to directly help people with her science, because women tend to be nuturers and care-givers. They may also be more inclined towards fields where answers are not so cut-and-dry, wrong and right.
Men, on the other hand, are better spatially and can thus process the abstract better. They get their kicks out of logic and rationality, whereas women are more likely to be intuitive thinkers who feel the truth. Men also have a different approach to technology than women. They grow up taking radios apart and helping their dad fix the lawnmower. Thus, when they enter science labs, the technology doesn’t scare them (as much), and they have a sense that they can take something apart and put it back together, no problem. I know it wasn’t the math that scared me in physics classes. It was all those circuits and condensors and doo-dads!
A year ago I participated in a workshop for women scientists and engineers, and we would talk about these kinds of things.
The one part of this discussion that I’m having a problem with is the idea that the financial success of women should correlate with their academic success . I think most of us older men have long recognized that girls are smarter than boys in general. We know this, because in my time individual grades were posted for everyone to see. Of course us boys never regarded grades as important, just passing. There is one other reason for success besides academic achievement and that is longterm motivation
While many women do not see their career as important as family, and look to financially capable men than can look after them if need be,particularly during child rearing and even beyond, many men are motivated to be financially successful in order to attain and maintain intelligent (therefore attractive) mates. Male employers looking to fill key positions with proven employees developed over a long term in subordinate positions are far more likely to find a male employee to fill the position, because most of the good entry level female employees have left to move with their husbands or raise kids.
To reflect on AA in general, rather than any affirmative action for men, I would suggest laying off all the intense social pressure on women to compete with men. For example the latest thing I’ve heard is the some school is alarmed because the percentage of women enrolled in IT programs has dropped dramatically. Hello!! How many young women do you see taking apart computers etc and running little repair businesses on the black market. In general, women aren’t interested in technology, just how to use it.
Nothing I’ve posted here should suggest that women or men are universally incapable of achieving what the other can.
I believe grades aren’t everything as well, and I think the same goes for test scores. However, whenever AA is discussed, inevitably someone brings up how grades and scores should bear overriding importance in deciding who’s qualified–whether it be for school or job positions. Because, the argument goes, it is unfair to let subjective, arbitrary things like diversity and race get in the way of making sound, fair decisions.
So if grades shouldn’t matter as much for men as they should for women (who you say have things attached them–like childrearing–that make them unattractive to employers) then why shouldn’t grades matter as much for other groups? If a school thinks, for instance, a Hispanic male “wants it more” than a white guy, why shouldn’t they use race as a criterion for choosing applicants? It can be argued that there’s no evidence that Hispanic males “want it more” than white guys, but then again, there’s no evidence that any given female wants it less than any given male, right?
AA-opponents argue that people shouldn’t be picked based on group politics. Choosing a man over a woman because you think the woman will have a baby one day is doing exactly that: not seeing people as individuals but seeing them as members of a group. As a woman who does not want to even marry, let alone have children, it would be unfair to not hire me just because someone thinks I’m going to be barefoot and pregnant one day. And if there are many people who feel like this, then maybe AA-for-women is still needed.
(I wasn’t sure if you were agreeing that it was right to discriminate against women for this reason, or if you were just stating the reality, so please forgive me if it’s the latter.)
Put “blacks” in for women and “whites” in for men, and you’ll see how twisted this argument can be perceived. I don’t think there’s a lot of pressure out there for women to compete with men. I think there’s a lot of pressure out there for people to compete, period. It used to be that women were excluded from this pressure, but now they aren’t. And I think it’s a good thing. I wouldn’t want anyone telling me, “Don’t worry about making it as a scientist, babe. Let the menfolk do all the thinking.” I know that’s not what you are saying, but your statement lends itself to that kind of interpretation.
I think as women enter hi-tech fields, they will change how these fields are taught so that courses are more “female-friendly”. I don’t think there’s anything intrinsic about women that keeps them from grasping technology. I think the answers lie solely in how we are raised and how we are taught, and these things can be changed.
