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.
The undergrad boys in STEM I swear have never met a woman aside from their mothers. No, please don’t follow me home. Please don’t buy me food because I was next to you in line. Please don’t follow me into a store so you can buy me anything I’m purchasing. You are not invited into my conversation because you think I’m pretty, even if you just want to interrupt to tell me I’m pretty and you want to take me on a date. You are not allowed to hug me and hold me as long as you want just because you want to and it feels good for you, I didn’t want a hug and I didn’t know you. It isn’t cute for you to take things from me and play keep away because you are stronger and taller, it makes you a bully.
Teachers: please don’t ignore me when I try and participate or ask a question. I’ve gotten Cs with no explanation, no marks aside from the grade itself. When I check other’s work, theirs is written up with mistakes and they have a higher grade. Honestly that was just one teacher in an undergrad, the rest were pretty awesome, or at least not sexist.
My CS classes were 90% male, and every professor was male, too. They all genuinely enjoyed my participation, and it was the only environment where I wasn’t objectified or disrespected. Same with my coworkers (again 90% male) when I went into the FAANG workforce; the men were happy to see women excel in a previously male-only field.
The general public was a different story until recently. Women were thrilled, a disturbing number of men refused to listen to me.
It probably depends on the university. There are definitely dregs of “incel” culture that get in but they can’t socialize and are usually left alone. In the workforce, interviews stop them from getting much further then that.
They probably haven’t. My experience was a lot of these guys were on the spectrum and the only social understanding of women they have is media. I would say the sexism is very malicious from the faculty, but from fellow students a lot of them this is the first time they’ve been allowed away from their helicopter parents and to begin learning social skills, sadly at your detriment.
Fortunately the ones who seemed socially awkward were the ones who did understand no. The majority who gave me scares were likely on the spectrum but none went too far. The ones who went too far and never respected no were definitely not on the spectrum, they were self centered and didn’t pay attention to others.
There are plenty of men who act like boys because they have seen grace for their actions their whole lives. The result is that they cannot learn from their actions because they never learned how. They cannot understand when others don’t let them do whatever they want, and they don’t recognize consequences for their actions because they never had any. This may describe some on the spectrum but it has nothing to do with autism.
I swear have never met a woman aside from their mothers
Are they less likely to behave this way after meeting you or is this sentence the essence of how you would react to their behavior?
(I haven’t done any of the things mentioned and they are inappropriate, but in retrospective think that maybe I should have, since being too polite and shy at the same time is apparently even less attractive, and reduces experience in communication, which is the only way one can learn to communicate.)
Just like there are lots of jerks and incels, there are lots of really nice shy guys that would make the world a better place by opening up a little more. Being brave at making contact is totally acceptable, and probably good for you, if you do it in a respectful manner. Actual nice guys should drown out the jerks that are self proclaimed nice guys by treating women, men and themselves with respect.
Should, yes. They don’t always. And there are still far more than enough guys (and people) who do nothing when they see women (or others) treated very poorly but men/boys. I sort of understand college and high school, everyone is exploring and unsure what’s ok, and observers may be entirely unsure what to do.
It’s pretty common for a bunch of people to see something bad happen and everyone think someone should do something without realizing they are someone who could do something.
In real life what “respectful manner” is becomes a matter of whether another person (and their friends) likes you or not. Sometimes retroactive.
I don’t like this attribution of some kind of affinity to justice to “people” or “men” or “women” or whatever. “People” are a rather cruel and fallacious substance most of the time.
Also jerks and incels may be that not entirely through their own fault. There may be wrong upbringing, or some trauma, which others consciously or unconsciously trigger, or whatever else, humans are complex and putting labels in such a way is disgusting.
I always hope people learn from their experience. I have no idea if they learned anything after interacting with me or assumed I’m some crazy female.
I meant that this quote is extremely humiliating, especially to people for whom it’s true. It’s hard to learn from cruelty, even if it’s unintended.
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.
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…
100%, when I was in middle school and highschool I was regularly called gay for not liking football, or not knowing random car facts, or not liking spicy food, and other stuff like that. It was much better in university, but it was in a different region so I can’t compare directly.
Interestingly, one of these bullies came out as gay 10 years later, which I find sad that someone had so much internalised self hatred that he had to project it outwards to feel better about himself.
I don’t know what middle/high schools are like today since I don’t know anyone in that age range, but I bet it’s much better now with today’s internet culture being much more queer positive.
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.
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.
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
They’re grouping non-binary people as female and pretending like this isn’t a problem for presenting a statistical analysis?
Who the fuck gave the go ahead for doing this research?
There should be separate reports on non-binary discrimination and female discrimination not combining the two and labeling them women. (in case you’re unaware, males and females can both be non-binary so grouping non binary people from either sex into “women” completely de-legitimizes the research)
Completely unprofessional.
They do include the effect size of including non-binary students when they write “(nb. Non-binary students account for 0.3% of this total)” etc. so the impact on the actual data is shown, if you’re concerned about the statistical analysis. It also does make sense to group them together in this context as they are both minorities in STEM. However the way the article is written makes it clear that including non-binary students was an afterthought; if it was clear in all the data and headings that the data is for both non-binary and female students with the interpretation that they are looking at just “students who aren’t men” then it would have been a lot better.
We cannot do effective corollary research if groups are not independently researched with their own data, a ‘minimum impact’ is still an impact, one which can be used to portray a larger or smaller effect than there is between the actual groups being compared against, especially when there’s a distinct call of ‘white males’ being a problem with no determination of class, culture or variance of religious vs non religious.
People are not blocks, they don’t vote as blocks they don’t work as blocks and they most assuredly do not behave as blocks. It’s important to specify, separate, and effectively research each group and sub group in order to determine the veracity rather than just applying a claim to a useful and popular current enemy, e.g. ‘white male’.
How is it unprofessional? It’s just a different data set, there’s nothing inherently professional or not about it.
Another way to say it would be “non-male” sexual discrimination. Which makes perfect sense given who are generally the target of that type of discrimination.
It’s just a statistic, dude. If you’re looking at it as something it isn’t, that’s on you.
Making wide claims on entire groups based on inferential data is inherently unprofessional. They didn’t stop at observing they’re making claims without evidence to back it up.
How one person feels about something does not automatically mean that someone was intentionally or even unintentionally hurting them.
That is the issue at heart here.
The conclusion are the same that you group or not : men in stem are male chauvinists who doesn’t tolerate those not like them and feel the need to oppress those.
Non-binary people can experience sexism regardless of how they’re born though. Your suggestion that just acknowledging that non-binary people exist without being disrespectful means research should be ignored is making the researcher’s point for them.
Did you read what I wrote or just immediately respond the second I said ‘non binary’? Also the fact you’re making this statement also indicates you didn’t read the source material at all.
I said, in NO UNCERTAIN TERMS, that they classified non binary people as women.
Your clear lack of reading comprehension is absolutely not my fault.
There’s no need to be disrespectful to me. I read you. I read your source you linked. I read the original article. You’re the only one that said anything about grouping non-binary people as women. Did you read the article? Clearly the people voting you up and me down didn’t. Make something else up to get outraged about.
I said, in NO UNCERTAIN TERMS, that they classified non binary people as women.
Except no, they didn’t. I know this because we are having this conversation. They are grouped together in this statistic, but they make it very clear that they did that, and what % of the block were non-binary.
There’s nothing wrong with what they did. Nobody is trying to trick anyone, they are very transparent about including non-binary people (people who also experience discrimination).
I know you want so bad to be a victim, but men don’t experience sexual discrimination in STEM. Anyone in a STEM career can tell you that.
