Feminism, The Next Installment

[Reny of Storms End]

I should note that when i say a lot i do not mean the majority.

I am also very serious.

This claim was not started after looking at numbers but by pure subjective observation which is, i believe, true.

I do not know how to best find data for or against. I will try now. I would ask for help though.

Yeah man, the strip club I go to is always hiring. That proves that more and more women only want the eye candy jobs.

[Cabbageleafbastard]

How does feminism aproach sex appeal, good looks benefits and similar things?

Is striving to look good a good thing because it lets a woman have more power or is feminism against that?

It is still noticable a lot of parents take their daughters' future careers less seriously than son's and some of them even partially stimulate daughters going for looks or just being a housewife.

But many times girls themselves choose that path.

Look well enough and you could be a model, work on TV, marry a rich guy, marry a standard guy and be a housewife or dozens of other things. Get hired anywhere a good looking girl is seeked to get the store/bar/firm reception more attention. There is also stripping, porn, all kinds of escort and things like that.

The number of males in these jobs is rising but the female market is much greater and growing faster. And their security in almost all those fields has improved.

And girls today know it. More and more lean on those possibilities as the market for those jobs is big and growing.

Women are still dragged down by parents and society perspective, discrimination and lack of rights but in most western cultures it has thankfully become almost non-existant in a lot of places.

I think the reasons we see less women than men in government, science, technology, high managment and other fields are shifting.

Discrimination reasons are going down but the appeal of other choices is rising.

It is still a societal problem though, just a bit different one.

I fear it will become clear for everyone some 5 years from now if things go the current way.

Those jobs will always be available to women, but how many pornstars have college degrees? Those jobs seem more likely to attract women who aren't interested in education, otherwise they probably wouldn't be in that profession. In my experience women do better in school than guys. My college had roughly 12000 people, and 7000 of those were female. A bigger issue would be why do women tend to stay in fields such as education and nursing, instead of moving into areas usually dominated by men. It's not from a lack of GPA, most females could get into any program, they just seem to prefer being teachers, nurses, ect.

[Pero the first of His name]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2324926/Majority-British-women-pick-housewife-having-career.html

First thing i found.

[Tempra]

Somewhat related to this conversation is the interesting article Zabzie posted in the last iteration of this thread: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/education/harvard-case-study-gender-equity.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0. It is a bit surprising that many (most?) women at Harvard Business School are so worried about their "social cap" and finding the right man that their academics suffer considerably.

After years of observation, administrators and professors agreed that one particular factor was torpedoing female class participation grades: women, especially single women, often felt they had to choose between academic and social success.

One night that fall, Ms. Navab, who had laughed off the hand-raising seminar, sat at an Ethiopian restaurant wondering if she had made a bad choice. Her marketing midterm exam was the next day, but she had been invited on a very business-school kind of date: a new online dating service that paired small groups of singles for drinks was testing its product. Did Ms. Navab want to come? “If I were in college, I would have said let’s do this after the midterm,” she said later.

But she wanted to meet someone soon, maybe at Harvard, which she and other students feared could be their “last chance among cream-of-the-crop-type people,” as she put it. Like other students, she had quickly discerned that her classmates tended to look at their social lives in market terms, implicitly ranking one another. And like others, she slipped into economic jargon to describe their status.

The men at the top of the heap worked in finance, drove luxury cars and advertised lavish weekend getaways on Instagram, many students observed in interviews. Some belonged to the so-called Section X, an on-again-off-again secret society of ultrawealthy, mostly male, mostly international students known for decadent parties and travel.

Women were more likely to be sized up on how they looked, Ms. Navab and others found. Many of them dressed as if Marc Jacobs were staging a photo shoot in a Technology and Operations Management class. Judging from comments from male friends about other women (“She’s kind of hot, but she’s so assertive”), Ms. Navab feared that seeming too ambitious could hurt what she half-jokingly called her “social cap,” referring to capitalization.

“I had no idea who, as a single woman, I was meant to be on campus,” she said later. Were her priorities “purely professional, were they academic, were they to start dating someone?”

As she scooped bread at the product-trial-slash-date at the Ethiopian restaurant, she realized that she had not caught the names of the men at the table. The group drank more and more. The next day she took the test hung over, her performance a “disaster,” she joked.

The deans did not know how to stop women from bartering away their academic promise in the dating marketplace, but they wanted to nudge the school in a more studious, less alcohol-drenched direction. “We cannot have it both ways,” said Youngme Moon, the dean of the M.B.A. program. “We cannot be a place that claims to be about leadership and then say we don’t care what goes on outside the classroom.”

The Harvard MBA is the ultimate Mrs. Degree. Who knew?

[Joyful Union]

The Daily Mail? You're just digging yourself a deeper hole dude.

[Xray the Enforcer]

Ah, that noted bastion of intellect and scientific rigour, the Daily Mail. And based on a shitty website poll.

Clearly we have a mental giant in our midst, my friends.

[Pero the first of His name]

Pardon me then as i do not know about any reputation Daily Mail has.

[Sci-2]

Pardon me then as i do not know about any reputation Daily Mail has.

Well you are looking for data, so that's a plus. If you are willing to change your mind when confronted with contrary evidence, it's a good thing.

I'm not sure if there is a language issue, but you seem to be conflating two things - the influence of porn and sex as commodity in culture and the lack of women in STEM.

On this board, what most people who identify as feminists are concerned about is equality of opportunity. There are many known barriers relating to overt and subconscious sexism that exist for women in STEM, such that it isn't simply looking at the male-to-female ratio.

For myself, I think it's possible we won't see a 50/50 ratio for a long time, even after many barriers have been addressed. But the important thing is we can evaluate and eliminate the sexism that does exist.

This is partly why I think you're attempt to explain the imbalance of men/women in STEM is flawed.

[TerraPrime]

So... just to be clear, we're talking about an idea that someone pulls out of thin air with no data other than his (and why do I think I am corect in assuming that the poster is a he?) own observations (which seems to involve pr0n) and who declares that he just doesn't trust surveys and data but yet, linked to an article that relies on a survey to prove his point? I just want to make sure I get the lay of the land correct before I jump in with a comment.

[Pero the first of His name]

Well, it seems that my concern that a huge, sad number of girls secretly want to be in eye candy proffessions or housewives is, judging by what was posted here, unjustified. I do not mean to take that further then.

Women have other pressures to deal with, created mostly by society.

More pressure to look good, to marry, to have children.

I think a lot of traditional parents do not help the issue.

I do think though that some fields in which we desperately want to see more women in simply have less women interested and male discrimination is no longer such a significant factor in most of places.

From the start of the thread i was just interested in how to make those jobs appeal to girls, rather than imposing desires and rules about what percentage of women must there be somewhere.

[Sci-2]

Well, it seems that my concern that a huge, sad number of girls secretly want to be in eye candy proffessions or housewives is, judging by what was posted here, unjustified. I do not mean to take that further then.

Well, this is a problem worth looking at - see the link Tempra posted.

I just think your post connecting this issue specifically with lack of women in STEM was flawed.

I also agree with you that pornification of culture is not a good thing, though I think some aspect of sexual liberation is a plus.

[Pero the first of His name]

So... just to be clear, we're talking about an idea that someone pulls out of thin air with no data other than his (and why do I think I am corect in assuming that the poster is a he?) own observations (which seems to involve pr0n) and who declares that he just doesn't trust surveys and data but yet, linked to an article that relies on a survey to prove his point? I just want to make sure I get the lay of the land correct before I jump in with a comment.

I do not think it was out of thin air but simply from observation not covered by any good data.

I was also trying to encourage everyone to look for data.

I said i would not really trust polls where young girls answer what they want to be.

When asked for repeatedly for data then i gave some that appeared good to me, i did not know the reputation of the newspaper.

[TerraPrime]

I do think though that some fields in which we desperately want to see more women in simply have less women interested and male discrimination is no longer such a significant factor in most of places.

But in my area, which is STEM, tihs is simply not true. Cultural practices both within disciplines and from society are still working to deter women from entering and succeeding in these areas. Some disciplines, like psychology and life sciences, are seeing more improvement on this issue than others, like engineering and computer science. But even in areas with higher female participation, there are still structural barriers. For instance, even though women now outnumber men in undergraduate enrollment for life sciences, they are still disproportionately under-represented in post-docs, research scientists, and faculty positions.

As to the reasons, there are many factors that have been identified so far. One of the more pernicious factors is the additive effects on career limitations based on low-level participation in early school years. Since many STEM fields require specific high school curriculum, a small disparity in participation of math and science courses in middle school (grades 7 to 9) can snowball into significant gaps later on.

Finally, there have been studies done in understanding why we lose students form STEM field to others, but in no surveys that I saw were "strippers" and "housewives" the answers being given.

[TerraPrime]

Just saw this article: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/2013/digest/theme2_1.cfm

Developmental gene expression is defined through cross-talk between the function of transcription factors and epigenetic status, including histone modification. Although several transcription factors play crucial roles in mammalian sex determination, how epigenetic regulation contributes to this process remains unknown. We observed male-to-female sex reversal in mice lacking the H3K9 demethylase Jmjd1a and found that Jmjd1a regulates expression of the mammalian Y chromosome sex-determining gene Sry. Jmjd1a directly and positively controls Sry expression by regulating H3K9me2 marks. These studies reveal a pivotal role of histone demethylation in mammalian sex determination.

We already know that epigenetic control of X-chromosome silencing in men is responsible for dosage compensation in mammals, so this seems like a good addition to the pile. The induction of inter-sexed mice by knocking out a key gene is a good demonstration on the importance of epigenetic control. I think we will continue to learn more about inter-sex development and how it translates into human behaviors regarding gender identities.

[Pero the first of His name]

I started with the thought that not all of the lack of women in STEM lies in males in those fields being unwelcoming.

I ment to explore every place girls are distracted and discouraged along the way to even consider those interests and find solutions.

I do think the fact models, tv personas, glamurous housewives, singers and even pornstarts get so much more media attention and young girls associating with them is definatelly accountable for many losses and is a problem to be solved.

[Xray the Enforcer]

Terra -- that last bit, is that supposed to go into the LGBTQ thread? I mean, it's cool and all, but epigenetic control of SRY gene expression is a bit far down the rabbit hole for a discussion of gender disparity in STEM participation. :P

[The Progressive]

Pero is truly a class-A baiter.

Well done pero, well done!

[Galactus]

[Pero the first of His name]

I agree the issue of the lack if women in STEM fields is a societal one.

But i think it is much more due to imposing traditional geneder roles dimaying women from giving them a go, rather than males in those fields being unacceptive.

[The Progressive]

:laugh:

That was brilliantly hilarious. Thanks for the link galactus.