Yesterday someone made the following rather absurd statement on my blog, as a response to my post on the highest paying profession for women:
Clearly, the desire for women to be engineers or whatever is about “honor”, and “respect”, not how to get the most cushy life.
The problem with this statement, though, is that people don’t go into engineering for “honor” or “respect”. Instead, you do it because you realize you are good at it, thus you are more likely to enjoy the work. Furthermore, you appreciate being employable. On the other hand, if you want “honor” and “respect” — presumably the commenter meant “prestige”, you would go into medicine or law, join the military, or become a firefighter. The caveat with law is that you are almost required to go to a T14 law school if you want to make it in the legal world.
Engineering, on the other hand, is a relatively low-status profession. This is particularly due to the influx of workers from the third world, predominantly India. As a consequence, salaries have been largely stagnant. No offense to my Indian friends, but if you sit in a cubicle farm with a bunch of people from the Third World, you are not high status, no matter how much bullshit you post on your Facebook wall.
Speaking of Facebook: The misconception of feminists is that engineering jobs are cushy and translate to easy money, thus there is the push for getting more women into that field. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could trace the beginning of the “get more womyn into tech” hype to a movie like The Social Network. You can almost picture Piggy and Tumblerrella frothing at their mouth because Mark Zuckerberg writes Facebook in, like, twenty minutes in this movie while dripping in white privilege. Consequently, they conclude that if Zuckerberg was half-black, half-Asian, 3/4 female, and 5/4 LGBT he could have done so in 12 minutes — and mathematics is a conspiracy of the patriarchy to keep womyn and minorities down anyway.
Like most modern people, your analysis suffers from a reductive materialist perspective.
You are not at your best when dealing with intangibles – you probably believe women (and men), are ruthless “fitness maximixation” machines when it comes to selecting partners, too.
You simply cannot comprehend a non-materialistic factor like “honor” – surely, it must be about money, or economic incentives, the bottom line.
I don’t blame you , you are merely a product of your culture, and few manage to rise above their culture.
Your analysis will always capture a very partial fragment of the whole picture, a valuable one, but one that displays the peculiar poverty of the modern mind.
Feel free to make a good argument for “honor”. So far, I have seen little more of you than posturing from you.
Obviously George is talking about “honor” of being financially independent professional living off of her work and not necessarily prestige of being engineer per se…
Equating “honor” with financial independence does not work, which can easily be shown by contradiction. Ask yourself: are (financially independent) escorts honorable?
george is trolling.
females and honor dont go together either .
Aaron… I think this is the same George you banned after a lengthy debate we had with him. This is the feminist who claimed to be a guy who had sex with 600 women, and all guys can do this if they just look around and see the women throwing themselves at him.
I don’t have the papers or studies, so hopefully someone can corroborate. I do recall, however, reading that whenever women enter into a (apparently) “prestigious” or high-paying profession, the prestige and pay goes down.
Look at teaching…medicine…and law… of course, feminists will decry the lower pay women earn here as due to glass ceilings, glass cliffs and discrimination. (Year after year I see “wage gap” papers and claiming that the gap persists despite factoring in maternity leaves and such.)
It’s funny, I know women who dominate certain jobs, like nicely paid government legal counsel jobs. Leads to a girls club…I don’t see any of them pushing for 50/50 male : female splits…NOPE, equality is all about women first, second, third, and forever!
I read about this before. Depending on the profession, there may be different cause-and-effect relationships in place, such as: once a job has been simplified enough, possibly due to automation, and women can easily enter it, their presence accelerates de-professionalization.
I think this whole ‘prestige goes down’ thing is just something rooshv people made up.
It’s impossible to “prove” the existence – the importance – of intangibles to a convinced materialist.
Your metaphysical assumptions preclude it. By definition, you can only accept material factors, and will reject any narrative, however compelling, that is not based on them.
Your analysis is not without value, it is just one dimensional.
George, I’d much rather you make an argument instead of bullshitting around.
As far as I know and as far as my and other people’s experiences go, “honour” is not a particularly female trait. (Just my 2 ct.)
I have known a lot of engineers. I cannot recall any doing it for honour, and that would be a profoundly weird motivator for a STEM job. Most were technically minded and enjoyed that sort of work. It can pay pretty well, depending on what your specialty is and where you go. Academically, it is a lot of work so if you were previously doing discussion seminars in gender studies, and transfer in, it will be a rude awakening. Generally, the gender ratios for the STEM fields tend to be really unbalanced and I do not think it has changed much over the years, in spite of attempts to encourage women to move into these fields.
As somebody who studied tech, and knows a lot of tech workers. I can say, there is little honor and respect in it. Most tech workers have reasons to dislike other tech workers. (Anybody who ever tried to compile something using the developers instructions only to figure out the developer forgot to update the instructions since the 90’s knows what I’m talking about).
And yeah, I recall from the 90’s that there was a huge push to try and get more girls in tech. Never worked.
However, girls in tech do have two problems, and one bonus. (according to what I heard about the serious research (sorry no links)). Girls in tech get paid less due to not negotiating hard enough (which does not only happen in tech, not only to women, boys who are not assertive also get shafted). Girls have harder times getting mentors. But on the positive hand, teachers are less harsh when girls fail, and more inclined to look the other way.
And one final thing, most techies don’t care about what is between your legs (a penis is a shitty coding tool), tabs vs spaces. Now that is a real issue. Not gender quotas.
Techies care about gender if it means having to work with incompetents. Great male techies don’t like working with male bozos either, though.
Honestly, I’ve met many very skilled female electrical & software engineers in my day.
I’ve found most of them competent and pleasant to work with. I don’t get at all what your problem is with women in engineering, even if there isn’t a lot of them
I have worked with competent women in technical fields as well. My problem is not with them, but with the current push of getting more women into that field even if they lack the qualifications. You certainly met the occasional woman who was promoted in order to limit the amount of harm she can cause. Well, even if you didn’t, you probably wouldn’t argue that both Cathy Fiorina and Marissa Mayer were largely made CEO due to their sex and not so much their competencies.