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Why Does Progress for Women in Science & Engineering sound threatening to some?

SCIENCE GRRL Asks: "Why Does Progress for Women in Science & Engineering Sound So Threatening?" Posted Jun 12th, 2009: http://girlwpen.com/?p=1647 From the article above: "Last week, the National Academies Press released findings from their study "Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty"." "Since 2001, the National Science Foundation through its ADVANCE program has invested over $130 million towards finding solutions to the problem of under-representation of women faculty members in science and engineering and that includes the hiring and promotion process. Very simply put, ADVANCE teams around the country have come to the conclusion that unconscious bias towards women from men and women has hindered the hiring and promotion of women faculty in STEM fields. This means that gendered expectations come into play. Is there evidence of children in a candidate’s life? Bonus points for the man, negative for the woman." Good news from the article: "An increase in women in the pool, getting interviews and offers, and doing just as well as men in terms of promotion should be a reason to celebrate. A lot of hard work has gone into getting to this point (which is not an end point, by the way), so why are some grumbling about discrimination?" Why are ppl threatened by these advances? According to the article: "The Chronicle noted the findings and a polite discussion about meritocracy and advantages that women receive, to the detriment of men, is happening. Seriously? Let’s look at the numbers from the study: • Women account for about 17 percent of applications for both tenure-track and tenured positions in the departments surveyed; •there were no female applicants (only men applied) for 32 (6 percent) of the available tenure-track positions and 16 (16.5 percent) of the tenured positions." If a shift is happening towards balance, towards equity, why is it threatening to some ppl?

Public Comments

1. Women's brains simply have great difficulty understanding many of the more abstract and sophisticated concepts in the maths and natural sciences and so they choose to study disciplines other than these. It's only through affirmative action that women are "pushed" into these disciplines that any significant increase is noted. Women simply are uninterested in these fields because their minds are generally better in the humanities rather than the more complex disciplines. They really haven't achieved much considering how few Nobel prizes have been awarded to women as contrasted with men in the recent decade. Women have advanced in all fields but not the maths or natural sciences because their minds find this too complex to understand at the higher levels of academia.
2. I have the impression that to a lot of people life is a zero-sum game and that's all there is to it. It's a reaction to a fear that most of us have to some degree: some group I don't belong to is making advances, therefore I must be losing something (even if I haven't been trying to compete in that particular arena). In this context any advances towards equity are seen as indicators of possible future imbalance. I think it's a preemptive defensive mechanism. It's too bad because we all lose out in the long run by holding others back, but it seems to be very embedded in human nature. Sorry I'm not more optimistic but I'm thoroughly disgusted at humans a lot of the time because of my work. Sabbatical coming up :)
3. If it were about equality, as feminists such as yourself will pretend - then it begs the question why are female dominated areas ignored, why aren't men/boys being pushed to enter these fields? But let's face facts for once... it's not about equality - it's about women getting ahead or at 'least' even. The blatant lack of interest in helping boys/men in fields where women exceed, and accounting that women exceed in many more areas than men do, demonstrates clearly the feminist supremacy fight - not one for equality as they pretend.
4. A lot of men get some kind of ego boost by the idea of women not being capable of some intellectual task, or some activity they consider "macho" and get extremely hostile when women prove them wrong. I've seen it myself, and you can often see it on here. Something about some men's psychology causes them to need for women to be weak and stupid so they can feel superior. They'll never admit this, but a woman with high intelligence scares the crap out of them. Pathetic.