We know that women students and staff remain underrepresented in Higher Education STEM disciplines. Even in subjects where equivalent numbers of men and women participate, however, many women are still disadvantaged by everyday sexism. Our recent research found that women who study STEM subjects at undergraduate level in England were up to twice as likely as non-STEM students to have experienced sexism. The main perpetrators of this sexism were not university staff, however, but were men STEM degree students.
I’m not even involved in a STEM job any longer but I still see tons of STEM employed men spewing manosphere bullshit all the time. I’m also starting to see more and more well educated, articulate women parroting it. These women also tend to be overwhelmingly conservative in their political positions, too. Especially well educated white women.
“Town square debates”, which anything like this is, tend to be driven by emotions and instincts. Those men may be better to their friends and acquaintances. Those women may too be parroting it simply because that position signals their belonging to some group.
My point is that being well-educated is less important here than it would seem, because it’s not about being correct.
In my experience the technology related fields are greater perpetrators than the base sciences. Though there is still an image problem for things like math (the not tech, engingeering or finance version) and a problem with people outside the field having sxcist expectations about those in it, I genuinely think the environment itself to be very inclusive.
I’m curious if they asked the men if they’d experienced sexism too. Most stem subjects are predominantly female so this seems to be a study seeking an answer that suits a narrative.
STEM is dominated by men. Especially the workforce. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf23315/. About 50% of women that take STEM majors switch to non-STEM majors, while about 35% of males switch. This is a Yale source, though.
You’re being disingenuous. The study posted relates to sexism at university where stem subjects are predominantly female.
Workforce stats /= University stats which I think you’re aware.
Source? The Yale link above specifically mentions:
Nationally, women make up 57.3% of bachelor’s degree recipients but only 38.6% of STEM bachelor’s degree recipients.
Anecdotally, I was in a STEM-focused school and major over 20 years ago, and it was overwhelming male-dominated. One of my colleagues graduated less than 10 years ago, and her experience was not dissimilar. She had to deal with quite a bit of sexism too, unfortunately.
As a woman engineer, yeah we’re probably disproportionately responsible. I’m sure science and math have more sexism than say art, but biology has to treat women better than engineering I assume.
I’m a guy so I realize I don’t see or understand everything from women’s perspective, but I’m genuinely surprised by this. I’ve worked for decades at companies with mostly engineers and mostly men, and my experience is that engineers have on average much more progressive views than, say, my neighbors. My current company recently switched from a male to a female CEO and I haven’t even heard anyone mention her gender, much less express any negative views in connection to her gender. My previous employer also had a female CEO and it just wasn’t a thing on people’s mind. At my current employer we have anonymous surveys to find problems in the workplace, and there were exactly zero people who reported observing any sexist actions.
I’ve heard sexist remarks twice in 20 years, and both times I was so flabbergasted that I didn’t know what to do or say before the conversation had already moved on. So if I’m bad at speaking up when it happens, it’s only because I didn’t get enough practice.
Where I come from, the engineering fields are dominated by men but medical fields have a female majority. I wonder what’s the difference with medicine
Medicine is more aligned with the cultural idea of “what a woman should be/do”. Taking care of others, showing compassion and so on is regarded as more “feminine qualities” than “masculine”. Note this is not something I agree with, but I think it probably is part of the picture.
I’d recommend Acollierastro’s YouTube video about the rampant sexism, sexual harassment, and sexual assault in physics and astronomy. While engineering is certainly a big part of the equation, every hard science except biology is dominated by men and that definitely feeds all of these issues
Not to mention that gay STEM students are more likely to face homophobia. It was rampant at my uni. We could not keep any sort of gay-related posters up without them getting ripped off and trampled within hours. Which in retrospect is wild because there were so many of us, and more who came out years later. lol
Uh… aren’t gay people the only segment likely to face homophobia? Like, you can’t be homophobic to a straight person…
Can’t you? What about not having “girly” hobbies because that “makes you gay”? Or having to dress a certain way? I feel like straight people aren’t excluded from homophobia…
I was called gay long before I ever had a gay thought in my head (on account of being prepubescent).
When I was being brutalized by bullies, gay was a generic derisive, associating things with homosexuality, the way cuck (now a generic derisive) associates with cuckold fetishists.
Meh not sure if it counts but an ex-client of mine decided to work out his fox news rage on me about my trans sister-in-law. Don’t worry, his manager was informed, the Google maps review of his employer now mentions it, and he really wasn’t expecting me when I knocked on his door late one night smirking and telling him what I did.
Christians going to Christian.
There can’t be many places in uni where women are outnumbered by men. It seems like that are taking a majority and trying to make out they are not the minority.
They aren’t talking about university as a whole. They aren’t talking about courses where men are massively outnumber by women. It seems they are using the one group of people where women come off worse than men to fit a narrative.
Either use the data from all the the university or not at all. Otherwise it’s data selection and biased.
Also the self reported sexism is very tiring because it in itself is biased. You hear it all the time something like Woman A : I get so much sexism of man A. He always talks over me.
Man b: yea man A is an arsehole. He talks over everyone, I don’t think he can help kt.
Yet you use that data and it looks like sexism because it is self reported. It’s not, I’ve noticed many women struggle in loud environments, that’s not sexism if she is treated the same as everyone else and just struggles with it.
Dismissing sexism within a particular group because it is disproportionately prevalent in that group is, frankly, treating that sexism as acceptable.
You can just as easily extend this approach until you either reach a group where it’s evened out, or is the entirety of humanity.
“It’s more prevalent in stem? No, you have to look at university students overall”
“It’s prevalent in university students overall? No, you have to look at all students”
“It’s prevalent in students as a whole? No, you have to look at everyone involved in education”
“It’s prevalent in education in general? No, you have to look at public services as a whole”
“It’s prevalent in public services as a whole? No, you have to look at all non-private entities”
“It’s prevalent across non-private entities? No, you have to look at all forms of work”
This is the most “not all men” answer I could ever imagine. You literally got angry at the data, not because there’s sexism, but because there are other men who exist in other places who aren’t sexist.
It’s well-documented that women don’t go into STEM. When data explains why women don’t go into STEM, getting pissy because there are men who are in other fields who aren’t sexist completely misses the entire goddamned point.
I think he may have stumbled past a interesting point (his main point was kind of dumb)-
While I would say the STEM crowd is more susceptable to a certain kind of intellectual narcissism that allows shitty behavior, anyone doing this kind of study should hopefully be making an effort to address the idea that if like 1/6 of dudes are extra shitty then are the STEM students uniquely shitty or are they just normal shitty and the classroom breakdown just means that there’s like 50% more shitty dudes and half as many targets for their shittyness.
That said, I’d love to see the stats on law schools as they tend have the “bro-est bros”
No it doesn’t.
I’m getting pissy that it’s always about women and women alone that are underrepresented.
If this data also included data on subjects where women outnumber men to the same rate then it would be interesting as a control. But seeing as they are just looking at data where women are already outnumbered it is manipulating the data to either get nothing or the result you want. It won’t for example show the result you don’t want.
The question is are people just sexist when they outnumber the other sex? We don’t know because it doesn’t get asked. Something needs to be done but what is unknown until you find out.
Girls quite possibly don’t enjoy stem as much as boys. That’s an entire possibility for men outnumbering women. But nevertheless there is a push to put more women into the only departments were they don’t already outnumber men. But there is never any push to put men into areas they are under represented. Like I said one sex might naturally enjoy something at a higher rate and that’s not a problem I don’t think, but with one exception. I think teachers should largely be evenly distributed. Especially in primary school there was 0 male teachers we could talk to or could help us with anything. I was lucky I had male role models that could teach me about being a guy at home and in afterschool clubs. But some kids don’t, they might not get a male role model until they are 13, then it might be too late.
Yep. I was right. You turned a conversation about “women are being harrassed” into how upset you are that we aren’t talking about problems men face. If you want to advocate for the problems men face, actually do that, instead of bitching when we are discussing problems women face.
Woman A : I get so much sexism of man A. He always talks over me.
Man b: yea man A is an arsehole. He talks over everyone, I don’t think he can help kt.
https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2017/07/07/men-interrupting-women
