Comment on Transitioning in STEM
ace_of_based@sh.itjust.works 12 hours agoim sorry, i want to answer you but you need to rewrite that whole mess, it’s intolerably difficult to read (unless you’re really just tellin a woman “this unrelated data doesn’t match your life experience”).
that would be comically stupid and sexist, and proving OP right!
I must be missing something. Maybe you’re doing a bit of satire? Embracing the stereotype of “italians=super-sexist”?
naw. I gotta be reading it wrong.
please rewrite this in italian so i can see the nuance lost in the translation
sudneo@lemm.ee 11 hours ago
I am saying that the very relevant data (ironically, gathered as part of the respect-stop violence project) indeed doesn’t match that lived experience. Which means that perhaps that experience cannot be generalized?
If someone claims that women are held to a higher standard, I think asking “how is it possible that on average, at all levels, they get higher grades and they are the majority of students?” is a fair question. The hypothesis that women are held to a higher standard in this context would imply the obvious conclusion that only the “best” would make it, which is in direct opposition with the data that women are a substantial majority of students everywhere.
On the other hand I perfectly acknowledged that gender stereotypes exist and these do explain both sides of the equation that I presented with “unrelated data”: they explain both having a mere 13% of females in IT faculties and having 8% of males in education faculties. The same exact dynamic applies to males and females, which both - due to peer pressure, and fixed gender roles - end up being discouraged to pursue certain careers.
If “women get discouraged their whole life” was a generally valid statement, then asking “why then they are the majority of medicine students, a faculty with the toughest admission exam, a scientific faculty and also a long and hard one - 11 years in total” is also a valid question in my opinion.
So yeah, despite what you might think, while I have no interest to debate or invalidate one’s experience, maybe this cannot be generalized if there are quite glaring issues with statistical data. Why would you consider data about gender distribution in the education sector in Italy irrelevant in the context of gender dynamics in education (in Italy, since that’s what my comment discussed), is a mystery to me. It’s even more of a mystery considering that that very same data was gathered specifically within the contest of a project about women equality.
ace_of_based@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
No, it completely misunderstands ops point, and i am flabbergasted that you should double-down like this. Can you provide for me other meanings for ops point? what “held to a higher standard” might actually mean? Until you can tell me how “but girls grades were higher ipso facto they were not held to higher standards” your spurious refutation of ops point is dismissed.
i don’t believe you, because that’s exactly what you are doing. if you’re not interested, stop doing it?
sudneo@lemm.ee 10 hours ago
What do you mean, what can actually mean? It means that women are held to a higher standard, which means that to achieve a given result, they need to perform at a higher level compared to people not held to the same standard (males). There is no standard that women are expected to meet to sign up to - say - computer engineering, exactly like there is no standard for males to sign up to -say- psychology. In both cases though there are social pressures that make sure that the people within the spectrum of “I have vague interest in this” will be pushed one side or another depending on their gender.
In the specific case, the frame of the discussion was the women studying subjects which are male dominated (I am generalising from the specific context of computer engineering). I don’t believe “higher standards” play a role here (in general), because otherwise we could not explain many data points.
What in your opinion means being held to a higher standard in this context? And if that’s the case, how do you explain the fact that women seem to make plenty of independent educational choices in many (most, in fact) other fields, and that they generally have a higher success than men? Is this standard only applied for male dominated fields? Does it mean that males are held to a higher standard in psychology, medicine, literature etc.? Because if that’s the case, then I find this concept of standard really redundant to what I consider social pressure to adhere to gender roles.
Contesting the general validity of one’s experience is not at all talking about that experience, let alone contesting it. So no, I am not doing it and I don’t have any interest in doing that.