But Paying Attention Is Hard
Toni Airaksinen pokes a stick at some contrived agonising:
This “intellectual trauma” is, you’ll be shocked to hear, entirely the fault of “whiteness” and “heteromasculinity.”
As we’re in the realm of the excruciatingly woke, the terms violence and trauma are of course misused and deliberately misleading.
The supposed violence and trauma, then, is actually an attempt to excuse rates of classroom misbehaviour among black students.
Throughout the paper in question, the term “brilliance” is deployed no fewer than seventeen times, as if it were some obviously inherent, pre-existing attribute – of students who can’t be arsed to study, who don’t pay attention in class, and whose grades, as a result, leave much to be desired.
Even more frequent is use of the term “whiteness,” an alleged phenomenon on which the paper is premised. Though readers in search of some clear and convincing definition, or some compelling evidence of its existence, may find their hopes dashed. We are, however, assured that “whiteness” is something that gets in the way of black students “maintaining their Blackness.”
And furthermore,
Saturated, you hear. Positively dripping with the stuff.
So, to paraphrase our fretful educators: Among these allegedly downtrodden and traumatised minority students, expectations of promptness and accuracy, of arriving at correct and verifiable answers, and handing work in on time, are alien things. Instead, it seems, we get lots of loud and goofy behaviour. Thereby disrupting attempts to learn by other, more conscientious students.
And which, it has to be said, isn’t entirely flattering of the drama’s supposed victims, or an obvious basis for sympathy, even pretentious sympathy. Nor is it an obvious footing for some sweeping, de-whitened reinvention of how mathematical knowledge might be imparted. All conjured into being at the expense of those more diligent and whose classroom behaviour isn’t selfish and disruptive.
Well, again, if a student doesn’t feel obliged to do the work, to learn, or to hand in said work by a given deadline, like everyone else, and instead spends class time pissing about, loudly, then being unwelcome seems an inevitable consequence of those choices.
And constructing elaborate, question-begging excuses for such behaviour, as if these inadequacies were somehow proof of obscured “brilliance,” things to which one should defer, and actively affirm, doesn’t strike me as a convincing, long-term solution. Indeed, it sounds rather… what’s the word? Oh yes, toxic.
Readers will note how any feelings of incompetence and not being welcome are immediately blamed on external causes, on some ectoplasmic “whiteness,” that Befouler Of All Things. As if such feelings had nothing whatsoever to do with the choices and behaviour, and the personal shortcomings, of the students themselves.
Instead, Dr Jasien and her colleagues expect the teaching of mathematics to be driven by the goal of “healing… intellectual trauma,” by paying “attention to the minds and bodies of students.” The students being, it seems, much less obliged to pay attention to anything beyond themselves.
And so, we’re told that “exclamations” and “cacophony” are “to be both expected and valued.” Because when you picture a maths classroom and people getting to grips with differential equations or vector calculus, the first thing that springs to mind is the word cacophony.
Update, via the comments:
As so, with eye-widening obliviousness, those who claim to champion certain supposedly downtrodden demographics do a disservice to those same demographics.
It’s a pattern we’ve seen before, of course:
Hardness and stiffness. And we can’t have any of that beastliness in the minds of people who may one day be working on projects involving cranes and scaffolding. According to Dr Donna Riley, whose words glow above, academic rigour and the expectation of competence are “exclusionary” and tools of “privilege,” and are unfair to women and minorities, for whom rigour and competence are presumably impossible.
Dr Riley goes on to inform us that engineers need to spend less time doing load-bearing calculations, and more time pondering “radical protest” and “Marxist traditions.” Yes, the design and construction of fighter jets, oil rigs and 1000-tonne tunnelling machines will one day be informed not by careful calculation, or a knowledge of materials and thoroughly tested principles, but by criticality, reflexivity, and “other ways of being.”
Update 2:
Regarding Dr Jasien and her colleagues, Aelfheld adds,
Ah, but, you see, Our Betters will purge the world of bigotry by embracing wholesale the mental habits of the bigot.
I’m reminded, for instance, of assistant professor of art education, Dr Albert Stabler, who regards objections to being assaulted in class as “white supremacist violence” – because objecting to violence is violence now – while excusing a near-continual disruption of lessons as displays of “cultural knowledge” and “kinetic” creativity. A creativity that includes vandalism, punching staff, and forcibly cutting the hair of female teachers.
On grounds that expecting even minimally civilised behaviour is “the overvaluation of white feelings,” and therefore “racist.”
And note that those peddling this worldview, this poisonous counsel, can get quite annoyed when minority students don’t want to play along.
Update 3:
Regarding Dr Jasien’s insistence that the rest of us embrace the value of gratuitous, unending, rather loud background noise, Finno adds,
It’s hard to see the mannered outpourings of Dr Jasien and her colleagues as anything other than a perverse, contrived inversion, in which those inflicting the disruption and “cacophony” on others are to be pampered and indulged, as if they were the victims of their own self-inflicted drama – around whom, all else must be made to revolve. Their selfishness, their disregard for others, is something to be affirmed and championed, it seems.
Because magic blackness.
And this is advanced as obviously desirable, an unassailable course of action. As “social justice.” As if it imposed no cost on others, over and over again. But I suspect that my attempts to master multivariate calculus would be somewhat impaired, or made entirely impossible, by lots of nearby shrieking and general arsing about.
Oh, and see also this, in which Ms Xochitl Gonzalez, a columnist for the Atlantic – and who repeatedly mentions how “minority” and “of colour” she is – is mystified and annoyed by people who don’t appreciate loud hip-hop in a university library. Where other people, better people, are trying to study for exams.
Via CavScoutCoastie.
This blog is kept afloat by the tip jar buttons below.
You learn much from arguing with your leftist friends. It’s not an everyone must always argument. Nor have I, nor John Rich for that matter, consigned to the Outer Darkness anyone who does not agree 100% with all of someone’s conservative positions. Putting forward the very reasonable suggestion, even putting forward that reasonable suggestion in an emphatic manner, should not be an invitation to recontextualize it into its most extreme form.
Some of us are just bloody fucking tired of being the only ones constantly pointing out the fucking problem, being told it’s not real, being blamed for pointing it out, being admonished for bringing it up again (regardless of the number of times we have waited and waited and waited for other known conservatives…conservatives in the room to speak up), and then admonished for asking the bloody obvious question, per Mr. Rich, of WTF is holding others back? Not every single one but surely, suuuurely there are more than just what? Mr. Rich and I? Again, regardless of the number of times you choose to reframe this in a poor, poor regular person context, I will put this back in my (and John Rich’s) original context of wealthy as fuck (conservative, country) musicians. Now do I overstate my case? Perhaps. Perhaps. I would say no. From personal experiences. But perhaps.
Such a militantly parochiaI attitude is jaw-droppingly self-destructive.
I have no Italian or Greek or East Asian ancestry, but love much of the art and music and literature, not to mention philosophy.
Wow, bitter much? You know, this might be your experience, but it is not everyone’s. AND the women ‘complaining’ aren’t the same women doing these jobs. The ‘complainers’ like the ilk following Betty Friedan complain because they failed at motherhood, wifehood and generally can’t maintain a healthy personal relationship at any time.
If happy couples sit down and decide what they want to do, who are you to pass judgement? Nothing keeps husbands from doing the part time work to spend more time home … and SOME do, with the plan on returning to full time when the kids are more self-sufficient.
Ever hear of actor Rick Moranis? Take a gander at his CHOICES.
Oh? Is this where you want to state that employers should be forbidden from structuring their businesses as they see fit?
See, conservatives not only support an individual’s right to negotiate the terms of their employment but of the business owner the right to run their business in the way they wish.
That’s called free trade, dear. If either doesn’t like the terms, go elsewhere. Not a contradiction at all. TANSTAAFL.
And bless your heart.
Madam is upset.
Relentless groove machine.
Yes, it’s quite a thing. And so, we have a humanities student at Columbia University, where annual tuition is $68,000, with opportunities many would envy, being emphatically indignant at the prospect of having to become at least somewhat acquainted with the works of Mozart. A composer of whom she has seemingly never heard. And whom she pre-emptively dismisses on grounds his sex and skin colour.
And this preposterous indignation, this militantly parochial attitude, is encouraged by her peers and by those employed to teach her. Those whose ostensible function is to impart knowledge. Resulting in, as Sam Duncan put it, would-be intellectuals “voluntarily, enthusiastically even, narrowing their intellectual horizons. Then claiming the high ground.”
And so, when smug pinheads insist that wokeness is merely “empathy,” and all about “being kind,” I’m inclined to point out things like the above, of which we’ve seen so many.
He’s really not convincing me he should be allowed in the ladies toilets and changing rooms.
It’s a pretty self-refuting stance. In that, the louder and more obnoxious the demands become, the less persuasive they are. While the reasons for saying no become all the more apparent.
Why do they always look like that?
In this new Golden Age of Trump (absolutely zero sarcasm intended or implied) when will we get an executive order reopening the asylums and mandating treatment for the obviously mentally unwell?
Indeed. Many employers are perfectly willing to negotiate terms in order to get and keep talented people. The only two tricky areas that come immediately to mind are (1) paying benefits to two part-time people instead of one full-time person–but this can be managed by negotiating salaries, and (2) jobs which require periods of intense full-time and even overtime work.
Remember that unintentionally comical old video of the fat kid pretending to be a Jedi lightsaber warrior?
Seen elsewhere: Grotesque trans person saying that refusing to “affirm” trans identity is nothing less than denying trans people are human beings.
wokeness is merely “empathy”
You know what convinces me that you are a kind person? You act that way. You do not need lawn signs or any physical virtue signalling to let people know.
I have my own rule of thumb that says if someone has more than three stickers on their vehicle, they are likely insane and/or difficult to deal with, even if I happen to agree with their agenda.
That person is driving about with a compelling need to let you know all about them, whether it’s their sexual orientation, love of running, or that Braxton, Mercaydes, and Brandeleigh participate in, respectively, baseball, soccer, and cheer while Mom hawks some MLM.
That is indeed the generally accepted rule of thumb.
A possible exception: people who add a sticker every time they visit a national park or monument, but I’ve never spoken enough with such people to form an opinion; it’s just that my gut impression of such stickers is much different than of message stickers.
Meanwhile, at the University of Leicester.
And at the National Theatre.
Funny how so many smart, educated people loudly show themselves to be stupid and ignorant…and depraved.
Ah, looks like the National Theatre has now deleted that excerpt from their X feed.
Is it Legz Akimbo?
Not entirely unfair.
I suppose what’s funny, or almost funny, is that that was the clip the theatre chose to promote the thing, presumably thinking it was the most daring and compelling. The scene most likely to wow.
And not something that would be mocked as ineptly written, badly acted, and politically predictable. By, among others, the white, working-class people whose lives and values it derides, and whose earnings are confiscated to bankroll such pretentious, wearying toss.
Heh. With the sound off that looks like hilarious parody. Like it’s supposed to remind me of the Star Wars sand people, or wtf they were called. What also is quite the tell is freshness and the quality of the kafir’s keffiyeh. Saint Laurent? Louis Vitton?
Sadly (?) it’s gone now.
Yes, I suspect they were getting some pushback from people outside of their bubble. Must have been quite upsetting, poor dears.
The message seemed to be, “These dumb, white proles like nationalism and Brexit, and football, which they watch in pubs on big-screen TVs. They even like their teams to win. Can you imagine? How terribly stupid and unsophisticated they are! LOL!”
Unless I’m missing some subtlety, of course. Though the script and the acting would suggest otherwise.
Oh, and for readers unfamiliar with the black comedy series League of Gentlemen, Legz Akimbo is an incompetent and insufferably right-on theatre company, doomed to perform their educational projects for unappreciative schoolchildren and the terminally unemployed.
[ Has sudden recollection from decades ago. ]
Back in the day, there was a joke going around which I heard repeatedly from my liberal friends:
Virtually none of these people had ever listened to Rush (nor had I, at that time), but they had heard or seen carefully edited short clips and misquotes, and were smugly certain that Rush really was a Nazi. And yet any honest person who listened to Rush knew he was no sort of fascist at all. What’s worse, they rejected all evidence that their “facts” were falsehoods.
“These are the sort of theories that sound good to intellectuals.”
21st Century Shakers.
Their ‘intellectual’ horizons are no wider than their phones.
You forgot ‘lying’.
Just a thought – why is empathy presented as virtuous? It seems a tad sociopathic to wallow in the pain and distress of others.
Sprockets.
It’s often deployed, by the manipulative, as sort of mic drop: “Why don’t you care about other people, LIKE I DO, SO VERY MUCH?”
But an ability to comprehend the likely thoughts and feelings of someone else – a shoplifter or burglar, for instance – doesn’t mean that one would necessarily be sympathetic, or would defer to their preferences.
Understanding them might have quite the opposite effect.
And as we’ve seen many times, progressives seem uniquely bad at understanding the thoughts and feelings of those who disagree with them. The spluttering inconceivability of someone voting for Mr Trump, for instance. As if there could be no perspective from which he would seem the lesser evil or a necessary course correction.
Women and work: when my wife worked, some women would urge her to stay home with the kids, and when she stayed home, some (different) women would urge her to work. There is no perfect solution to this conflict due to limited time in a day. Every option has tradeoffs.
Freud would love the claims that “rigor” is about the male penis (hardness, etc). Such projection makes an IMAX an inadequate analogy. I remember in the 80s maybe some feminists railing against skyscrapers as a phallic symbol of the patriarchy, as if people erected (heh) them for that purpose rather than because space is limited in a downtown area.
See also this. And umpteen others like it.
Trump: the lesser evil and a necessary course correction.
Speaking up: living in a society that punishes people for the “wrong” views means that speaking up must be very deliberate, with awareness of the price one might pay. I have been punished at work for having the wrong views on climate change and know people who lost their jobs over it. I may have been denied a job post I applied for due to my views on feminism. That of course is what the Left intends. Shut up, they explained.
In addition to the insulting intro, that entire rant proceeds without ever addressing the point of the post that offended you. There are enormous sunk costs to educating a high skill worker, starting at university level — every person taking up a sought-after spot in a graduate school is taking up space energy that could be devoted to training someone else — and continuing through the hiring and employment process. Those women A) on average put in less useful hours over a lifetime in their career than an equivalently educated man, and take up more than a man’s share of company resources. Two part time employees != one full time employee.
“Deserving” probably hasn’t got much to do with it. Fear of lawsuits for firing someone due to sex? Feeling forced to avoid losing institutional knowledge and client relationships? Yeah, those are the benefits, but they wouldn’t be dealing with the conundrum if it were men.
You sit down. And raise some kids fulltime. That’s a job Western women are really falling down on, looking at our below replacement level childbearing rates.
Even as much as he gets it, he still misses the big point in his story. There is no economic hit. There is only economic improvement. Elimination of the middle man. The $5 that the gang member steals from the tomato seller still gets spent, and is returned to the economy more directly when the tomato seller spends it himself.
Ah, but the highly educated “economist” referenced is a middleman himself. Big time.
I was more fortunate. But there were a few former co-workers who hated me for my opinions, so much that it would have been pointless to apply for a job at their new employers.
Yes. But there is a price to pay for not doing so. And we have been paying it for decades now but more and more intently and to an absurd degree in the last few years.
As have I. But as a person of some skill and means, I feel a responsibility to do so. To my point above, men died on beaches in Europe, North Africa, Italy, the Pacific, etc. etc. etc. The greatest risk I faced was what? Loss of a little bit of money? Lifestyle? A promotion? Prestige from people who are generally a bunch of cowards themselves? I didn’t come from a family of significant wealth yet most of the conservatives…conservatives…that I worked with whose parents were professionals, whose college educations were not a significant burden for themselves or their parents, were far less likely to speak up.
In a twitter thread a couple days ago one of the comments regarding Trump cutting out and putting pressure on DEI stuff asked if he could stop the mandatory DEI training requirements for real estate licenses. I was amused by that. My father became a real estate broker in his second career and I am trying to imagine him in one of those classes. WWII combat infantry veteran, Purple Heart, Bronze Star (that he was awarded but never claimed). It was funny enough the conversation that he and I had regarding the diversity training classes that I had to attend when working in the 90’s-2000’s. He refused to believe some of it so I wouldn’t tell him the half of it. He would think I was making it up.
The empathy is always very selective, directed only at the left’s mascots. It is thus better characterized as fake empathy.
Link.
Well, most men I know don’t get to have the option of doing part time. Because they usually earn more (women don’t marry down, no matter how feminist and careerist they are), and also wives take it for granted that they will be the ones taking a break from careers post child, while the father slogs away to pay the bills.
And the point precisely is, no man, myself included, feels any resentment or bitterness about this, most men I know use their spare time with kids and happy to be the provider.
My point was that – and apologies I know bit of a tangent – that women get to have the option unlike men, they largely choose to go part time because they prefer it… And still feel bitter and resentful about it.
This isn’t a theory, it’s an observation of my friends, colleagues etc of ages 30-50.
It’s the same mindset that causes modern women to complain about “patriarchy” in Maths, chess, IT, sports…. But even after these fields bend backwards to give them preferential opportunities, they still don’t do it, and leave the field or go part time in large numbers, they just continue to be bitter and resentful about it
It’s a weird mindset that’s the product of modern day “resentment” feminism, and it’s a big problem for the women themselves. Because they are never happy.
It’s often deployed, by the manipulative, as sort of mic drop: “Why don’t you care about other people, LIKE I DO, SO VERY MUCH?”
When in reality, they care about “caring” not about the riffraff and even their “caring” is really just a veneer to cover their manipulation.
Exactly. Here’s where my real resentment kicks in. Men don’t have a (realistic) choice. One way or another, to varying degrees, men…the kind of normal, traditional men who are the targets of what I am about to describe, are looked at as weaker or angrier or more unstable or…whatever. Women have much wider choices (yet they still bitch even about having choices) than men. They can get themselves into a situation and bail at any time. Yes, even pregnancy. Women have more choices even there. Men are expected to just suck it up and soldier on. I’m not complaining about that itself myself. That IMNSHO is how it should be. But I am mighty f***g tired of society pretending that the situation is not that way while also ignoring how such a reality might affect how men deal with problems differently from women. And by “women”, I might also include well off men from successful families. Relative to working class and struggling class men, they have options very similar to those of women. Which somewhat explains the convergence of their attitudes with those of women.
To support S Ike’s argument: over the past 50 years, the happiness of men (as measured in surveys) has remained rather stable. For women there has been a continued decline. I think it is because what they have been told will make them happy (a career) does not in fact make them happy. They also get contradictory expectations from society. The happiest women are those with a family and a more traditional role in that family–again based on surveys, not my opinion.
For men, mostly they do not expect their job per se to make them happy–it is the role of provider and protector and fixer that the job enables. The accountant does not get “joy” from accounting, he gets pride. Women are not wired the same way and being a provider does not in general instill the same sense of pride in them.
[ Checks links in tomorrow’s Ephemera one last time, weighs pros and cons of a gin and tonic. ]
Triumph the Insult Comic Dog is…conveniently back. Interesting in itself if you try not to think about it too much. The “we”…shit, I’m doing it again. Take the ‘W’…
Just my observation but accountants are accountants because they have differing definitions of “joy”. I mean, I like math but…
[ Chops lime. ]
This is hilarious. Mostly because it appears that the sign-language interpreter guy repeats what the street heckler is saying.
[ Slurps gin and tonic. ]
Unfortunately…or not…you probably need a Facebook account to see this advert but…this has gotta be the (literally) gayest rugby promotion ever. Though perhaps rugby is all gay now? Seriously. If you are trying to sell rugby to an American market, a Trump Golden Era America market…well…Swishy Sharks ain’t gonna do it.
This utter horseshit is just one of a thousand reasons why I stopped teaching math and became a truck driver.
A racist! incident in the town where I used to live. I can almost guarn-damn-tee you that this is a Smolletization. Yet if you read through the reactions of people in the community there (the mayor is a real piece of work as I recall), everyone is shocked! Shocked! Yet not one single thought that maybe, just maaaaaybe, this might be a faked hate crime. Conveniently occurring just before the museum was set to open. Oh, my!
You’ve also got all the people who aren’t injured or killed for daring to be between the criminal and their unlawful spoils. Or the people who can actually get any fruit at all because the young fruit seller humped a few crates to somewhere they can get to.
Instead we get “Don’t you dare think about stopping people from throwing stones at windows! Think of the glaziers!”
Mind, it’s easy to see how government ‘workers’ get confused when their entire livelihood involves taking money from taxpayers and giving it to someone else.
I prefer to think of the Jack Hawkins movie.
Oh dear lord. Sorry but in modern times most people/ male or female/ change their careers at least once. What you did at 25 may not be what you want to do at 45 or 55. The hotshot surgeon at 35 may want to teach by 55.
The pro-basketball player at 22 may quit at 27 and teach elementary school for the rest of their life because all that time/expense/energy at making the pros isn’t worth the time on the road. <—not a hypothetical. Look up Dave Meyers (I went to high school with him).
NO one can predict what any individual is going to do with whatever education/training they get. If they are the most talented at “X”, it is entirely unfair to not allow them to pursue “X” because someone else that looks like them dropped out, or died of cancer, or was hit by a bus and died.
Some people find their dream career at 20, some at 45. If they’re good, stop blocking individuals based on how you think the GROUP behaves.
I did, hon. 4 daughters, I was a SAHM for 17 years. Re-entered the workforce when youngest was in middle school. Had a whole other career that I retired from in 2020. And still my proudest acheivement is my daughters growing into serious, competent women in successful marriages and five thriving grandkids (the two oldest are active Navy).
AWFLs are the result of Marxist feminism promulgated by people like Betty Friedan who used feminism as compensation for her own failure at marriage and kids.
And whatever group of AWFLs or their more melaninated sisters is lurking about, that doesn’t excuse not dealing with individuals AS individuals.
Put some ice on it, son.
Yes, yes. Not All Women Are Like That. This isolated exception completely disproves a widely observable pattern.
Great! So I can choose to hire only men for my engineering startup then without suffering any legal consequences whatsoever? Oh, I can’t? Curious, that.
I’ve mentioned before my freshman Chemical Engineering class. Only 60 seats, incredibly hard to get into. Of the 12 women in the class in first year, only three were left by second. The rest took their free year of tuition and then transferred to easier programs. Leaving nine less engineers graduating that year.
I once had a co-worker storm out of the office, swearing a blue streak, because I pointed out that in rural areas where a fire isn’t likely to spread beyond a single farmstead and fire departments are largely volunteer-only, that private fire fighting/insurance was an entirely reasonable option. And that expecting private firefighters to risk their lives when you hadn’t paid them was a bit unfair.
My annual ethics-in-international-business training videos are so diverse that the unfortunate implication is that only brown people in brown people countries commit bribery.
Social shaming only works as long as men still give a shit about your dis/approval. Read the room.
In which Darleen either pretends to not understand statistics, or actually doesn’t. Thinking she can gaslight me into not noticing that women’s lower average career earnings and hours worked are because they, on average, put their degrees to less use than men and choose less-demanding professions than men, and work fewer hours per week than men.
Most places would prefer to hire a men for an important position, not a woman who might get pregnant and ding the company for an expensive maternity leave, then only come back part time. But women demand special consideration for their significantly less-attractive hiring profile.
You can’t afford to “treat people as individuals” when you make societal judgments about large numbers of women. Did you know insurance companies don’t treat everyone as individuals when calculating risk pools? “Oh, it would be wrong of me to charge this 16-year-old boy who’s a new driver more for insurance than 45-year-old women who statistically have far fewer accidents! After all, I know nothing about him individually!” said no insurance analyst ever.
Don’t attribute something to me that I’ve never said, dude. In fact, I’ve pointed stuff like this out time and again when Marxists insist on the nonsense stat of “women earn 78 cents on the dollar to men”.
And I’ll say again SO WHAT? Employment decisions should never be made on some f**king GROUP stat. And a smart business owner hires the best for the job at hand … and taking a brilliant woman on her second career or a brilliant man on his third is up to THEM, not some sniveling collectivist using group stats to deny jobs to people who change their minds between the ages of 22 and 72.
That’s called freedom of association. An American principle you seem unfamiliar with.
Your knee-jerk Marxism is noted, dude. I’d say go eff yourself, but I doubt you have anything of significance to grab onto.
Don’t care. If you think I support anti-discrimination laws, I have enough writing online that you can easily find something to support your risible claim. Knock yourself out.
But I’ll repeat to you what my own late father said that *I* repeated as a 16 y/o to a racist teacher who was brow beating a class about how we white kids were living on stolen Mexican land (So.Cal) and irredeemably racist because “Mexican-Americans being under-employed by white business owners.
The teacher had no answer for me except a derisive “well, yeah, maybe your dad would hire me, but he wouldn’t have me over the house for dinner.” This was the late 60s and it’s something that really impressed on me the basic covetousness and dishonesty of the racial/sex spoils ilk.
Any HONEST employer hires the best individual. Making decisions via sex or race as the primary condition of rejection is downright stupid.
Are you this stupid, hon? That you would reject out of hand an engineer just because of what’s between her legs instead of what’s between her ears?
Hmmmm…
A slightly different perspective: In my two-semester freshman physics and chemistry class, half the students of both sexes were gone by the end of the first year. (The class was intentionally tough for two reasons: To prepare students as much as possible for more advanced classes, and to weed out those who did not have what it takes for physics and chemistry majors.)
Gregory Benford weighs in:
If women tend to be much less interested in the intense commitment that some professions require for high achievement, then it is reasonable for those who mentor newcomers to entertain doubts about the payoff of the time they spend mentoring.
Such doubts are not rare, although I can only recall one professional who was actually hostile to women entering his profession and I believe that was because he simply disliked women in any context or setting.
Again, it’s back to negotiation between the employer and employee. If a lawfirm wants 80 hour weeks and time devoted to billable hours, then they are going to lose talent, male or female.
When my stepson was in law school, he spent two summers interning at my DA office. He worked with and was mentored by several brilliant attorneys, many of whom came from business law firms. They loved practicing law but felt exploited by some of these firms because – despite great salaries and a path to eventual partnership in the firm – the hours worked and demands placed screwed with time with family and even their own interests. Getting back time was much more valuable to them than a high salary and no life.
Agreed!
I don’t know much about the legal profession, but I do get the impression that partners are generally expected to put in huge hours.
The STEM fields are similar, especially for grads and post-grads and anyone who does not yet have tenure: Long hours doing and publishing research. The fields select for people who are by interest and temperament are motivated to work those long hours.
There is an old joke about physicists getting married so that they don’t have to spend time dating.
There is another old joke about a physicist in the mall, browsing a bookstore while his wife shops for clothes. He gets to talking with a beautiful woman who invites him back to her place where they sex. Afterwards, he feels horribly guilty and runs home to apologize to his wife. She angrily replies, “You’re lying! You were in the lab!“