Women Scientists

One of my Facebook “friends” is a guy I went to college with.  He then proceeded to go down the road of SWPL faggotry by getting a masters in Human Computer Interaction, move to San Francisco, see U2 and Coldplay in concert, and wishing he worked for Google or Apple designing useless, expensive gadgets.

In actuality I am probably not his friend, as we probably do not see eye to eye on a variety of subjects, particularly on how to live.  And how to contribute to a healthy culture and a healthy society.

Yes, I know.  Even calling a culture “healthy” or “unhealthy” reeks of ethnocentrism.  People who use that word in a derogatory sense are themselves ethnocentrists; they simply ascribe to the peace/love/understanding/cancer fad that despite all evidence against its usefulness has yet to die.  I bide my time.

He commented on something one of his friends posted, a girl whose profile I could see because she is an alum of our mutual university and is part of that network.

The post was a link celebrating the “legalization” of gay marriage in Washington DC.  You know how I feel about that.

But here’s another interesting link posted by this rather singularly unattractive person, with excerpt:

Is Motherhood Keeping Good Scientists Down? How to Fix Research’s “Mommy Gap” – The Human Condition

Ugh.  Pass the bucket.

Last week, the Center for American Progress (CAP) reported that family obligations (read: child rearing) are still pushing young female researchers out of science.

The findings build on a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report from earlier this year that also dissected the biases against women in science, but concluded that much progress was being made. Taken together, the two studies suggest that the stumbling block for women researchers is not being a woman but being a mother.

Wait.  Stop the presses.  Is Jeneen Interlandi , the author of this piece, actually suggesting that the culprit behind the stagnation of a woman’s career is not a result of sexism but is instead a result of a woman exercising her right to choose not to abort her pregnancy and become a mother?!  Who would have thought?!

Of course, let’s not get away with ourselves.  We all know that institutional sexism is still the reason that a mother is penalized in her career but not a father.  After all, the father doesn’t stay home with the baby; he continues to work and add those years of experience on to his resume.  This is patently unfair.  Clearly, far too many Americans are still gender conformists.  Let’s get active!

Or let’s read on instead.

There’s no dearth of suggestions on how to fix the problem. The National Association for Women in Science suggests that universities make a more concerted effort to recruit women for open faculty positions—by targeting their advertising toward women and being sure to include female faculty members on any search committee.

There’s no dearth of suggestions on how to fix the problem because our taxes pay for cushy think tank jobs where idiots with degrees in things like sociology sit around all day and do nothing but consume federal funding and churn out worthless reports to be quoted by worthless 2 bit journalists like Jeneen Interlandi.

We paid the National Assocation for Women in Science to come up with the brilliant suggestion that recruiters should add, “Women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply” to every job posting.  Yes, we paid them to pull a play from the same old tired Affirmative Action playbook that we’ve been seeing for 30 years now.  And hopefully, faculty recruiters will be pressured by a strong desire to immunize themselves against anti-discrimination lawsuits by placing a vagina on every hiring committee to ensure that gender is not used as a factor in hiring decisions.  Oh, the irony!

The CAP recommends providing financial support to labs to offset the productivity loss when a scientist takes family leave, and providing women who are pregnant or have newborns with special funds to hire a technician to help them out in the lab.

In other words, instead of simply hiring a man who does not suffer a productivity loss when he has children, university faculty should hire a woman, pay her full salary, and then on top of that, hire a graduate student as a “technician” to do her work for her while she escapes to the breast feeding room (which used to be a man’s office) for 2 hours with her newborn.  Wait, there isn’t a feeding room in every single one of your university facilities?  That’s nothing a lawsuit can’t fix.

When I unravel the reality of a message like this one, doesn’t it become clear why these types of things have to be legally mandated because nobody in their right mind would ever do as Center for American Progress (CAP) suggests?  To me, this doesn’t sound like progress, this sounds like sexism; allowing a woman to have her cake and eat it too, typically at the expense of a man who was probably overlooked for his position because the hiring department hasn’t met its legally mandated diversity quota, e.g., there aren’t enough people with vaginas on the staff.

I really like this next suggestion:

And the NAS and others have endorsed “stopping the tenure clock” for faculty members who want to start families. Tenure-track scientists have a certain number of years to establish themselves—which means publishing as many influential papers in as many prestigious journals as possible, usually over the first decade of their employment. Stopping the clock means adding an extra year or two to that time frame to allow for a less productive year after the birth of a child.

Yes, of course.  The rules of the game do not suit women who also want to have children, so let’s change them.  If a man works 10 years, he gets credit for 10 years of work when considered for tenure.  If a woman works 3 years, takes 3 years off to rear chidlren, and then works 4 more, she gets credit for 10 years of work when considered for tenure.  Is this fair?  Why should we allow for less productive years for women when we could avoid a less productive year by just hiring a man?  This is often your tax money, by the way, since universities are primarily funded by the state.

Okay, okay.  It’s time to acknowledge the fact that motherhood is not just a valuable role in society.  It is the most important role in society.  If every woman in America decided that university tenure was more important than having babies, America would be extinct after one generation, now wouldn’t it?  Mothers ensure the continuity not just of our society, but of our culture and in fact our species itself.  So it is easy, especially if you are a woman with both career and motherhood aspirations, to suggest that our society should do as much as possible to cater to mothers and motherhood as fairly as possible.

But think about it from a man’s perspective for a minute.  As a man, I can never fill the role of mother, only father – and a foundational premise of this entire debate is that mothers are disadvantaged in the workforce whereas fathers are not because motherhood typically involves some form of maternity leave longer than a week, and I think this is a fair premise.  Since I can never be a mother, the only thing I can ever “be”, in the context of this discussion, would be a professional.  As a result, why shouldn’t I have certain advantages in that regard?

It’s a matter of perspective.  I would claim that a woman with strong career ambitions, such as to become a famous scientist, would view motherhood as a type of chore, one that will divert her attention from her goal.  In theory she wants children, but only if it won’t interfere with everything else she wants.  She doesn’t want to have to choose.

But there are other kinds of women, and I would argue that they are in fact the vast majority of women whether they’d admit it in open company or not.  I am married to that kind of woman.  That kind of woman sees motherhood as her primary motivation and her career as a secondary occupation that is, in effect, a means to an end.  For a lot of working people, both men and women, we work because we have to, not because we want to.  While many of us, myself included, enjoy our jobs, could we really envision ourselves working 40 hours a week if we were independently wealthy?

Science, though, tends to draw people who do it because they love it, and so to them it is not as much a job as it is pursuit, and motherhood is in the way of that pursuit.  But like all things, science and research is credentialized and monetized; there are only so many positions for research scientists to get paid to do what they love, and women must compete with men for those positions.  Thus, motherhood is a handicap.

Blame God, ladies.  I didn’t choose to be a man and you didn’t choose to be a woman, but we are what we are and we have to work with what we have.

To Interlandi’s credit, she readily acknowledges this:

But none of those solutions addresses the real problem. It’s not innate gender differences that hold women back (just look at this year’s Nobel Prize winners in science). It’s not even gender bias (OK, maybe a little, but that’s not the biggest problem). It’s that science is demanding and very, very competitive. No matter how family-friendly a given university is, a scientist who chooses to have a baby risks having her next big breakthrough scooped up by a competitor who chooses to spend 24/7 in the lab. Changing that will take more than a handful of policies; it will require changing the nature of the game itself. I don’t think that’s possible, and I’m not entirely convinced it’s desirable. It’s competition, after all, that spurs innovation and advancement.

For a second there, I was impressed.  But then in perfect liberal fashion, she acknowledges that what she calls a weakness from one perspective is actually a great strength from another, and then immediately invents a solution by way of legal machination to eliminate the strength and leave only weakness.

As she asserts:

What should be possible is distributing those trade-offs more evenly between women and men. Instead of obsessing over mother-scientists, universities should strive to create an atmosphere that encourages their male scientists to be active fathers. Only then will both genders be equally compelled to confront the family-work balance issue that right now rests too squarely on the shoulders of women.

Women are disadvantaged by the time sink necessary to raise a baby.  Rather than the university accept the fact that half of their workforce, their female scientist,s during childbearing years will likely bear children and be less productive while their children are young, or worse, not productive at all because they are out on maternity leave, the university should also compel men to be less productive while their children are young by some mechanism.  Thus, instead of losing half of your staff to the task of raising children, you can lose all of it.

Brilliant.

Some suggestions: Pay female scientists as much as their male counterparts, so that when scientist couples plan for a family, the woman isn’t automatically compelled to ditch her career simply because she earns less and he earns more. Have paternity leave on par with maternity leave; if you’re going to stop the tenure clock for child rearing, extend that offer to new fathers as well as new mothers.

If there’s a reason not to be liberal, this is it.  I can’t believe that a thinking person could come up with this as a kind of solution.  Let me repeat: this liberal’s “solution” is to make both male and female scientists become less productive as a result of having children instead of cutting our losses and letting only the female scientists become less productive.  I say “solution” because it’s only a solution if you acknowledge a problem, and that problem is that “it’s not fair.”

Life isn’t fair.

The real problem is that some potentially brillaint female scientists who might do wonders for our technical progress choose to have children instead of continuing their careers as researchers.  The author states this as clear as I did only a few paragraphs before.  So it’s not like she doesn’t know.  She’s just replacing the real problem with a fake problem, a facade, the problem of “equality.”  Standard ply of the liberal trade.  Why do they do this?!

So we’re going to invent a solution to an imaginary problem whose consequences make the actual problem worse without really addressing the imaginary problem either.  If we did what this dingbat is suggesting, now we’re in a situation where not only will we lose the contributions of brilliant female scientists, but we’ll lose the contributions of brilliant male scientists also for the sake of continuing the species.  Great idea.

And of course, in case you were wondering, when the author says: “Pay female scientists as much as their male counterparts,” there are two ways to accomplish this: raise the pay of a female scientist to that of a male scientist even though she has comparatively less experience in the field, or lower the pay of a male scientist.  As a budget-minded university comptroller, which would you do?

In closing:

No matter what institutions or individuals do, having both a career—any career—and children requires making choices, and then making sacrifices. The more demanding the career and the more ambitious the individual, the more difficult those choices will be. But women shouldn’t be the only ones who have to choose.

In a single phrase, we summarize the defect in thinking that causes liberalism.  Women shouldn’t be the only ones who have to choose.  Why?

Seriously.  Think about that for a minute.

What if I said this:

Women shouldn’t be the only ones who have to menstruate.

Absurd, isn’t it?

Yes, I agree: menstruation is not pleasant.  Being a man and never having experienced it I can assert with confidence this fact and there are few women out there who would disagree.

Now let me ask you how to solve this problem.  Do you stop women from menstruating or do you cause men to menstruate, too?  The choice should be obvious.  But the entire thrust of Interlandi’s piece here is centered around crippling male scientists’ careers the same way female scientists’ careers are crippled in the interest of equality.

A corrolary of this is wealth redistribution.  Does it make sense to make everyone equal by taking from the wealthy, giving to the poor, in hopes that everyone will have the same amount?  If you follow most western nations’ tax codes, that is exactly what we do.  These codes were written and passed almost unilaterally by liberals.  The better solution is to find a way to elevate the poor to level of the rich; instead of elevating half of the population at the expense (and thereby the lowering) of the other half, do nothing but elevate the lower half.  In other words, only elevate, never lower.

This is often scoffed at by liberals because they know fully well that it is much easier to take wealth from those who already have than it is to create wealth in those who don’t.  And why is it easier?  Because the wealthy are usually wealthy for a reason: they were the ones who were both capable and willing to create wealth by their own initiative.  The poor are sometimes capable, sometimes willing, but usually not both; that’s why they’re poor.  It isn’t right or wrong, it is what it is.  Until God starts creating men to be equal in both capability and drive, we will have diversity in results.

The same thought process can easily be applied to women in science.  A woman is born a woman.  What she does with herself is up to her, but ultimately she has to choose.  And if she chooses to have babies at the expense of her career, if we do anything for mothers scientists, it must be done at no expense to those unburdened by motherhood, e.g., men and childless women.  That means establishing a set of rules that does not handicap the people who choose to spend 24/7 in the lab for no reason other than that the people who can’t or won’t work as hard can reap the same rewards for less productivity in the name of equality.

Changing that will take more than a handful of policies; it will require changing the nature of the game itself. I don’t think that’s possible, and I’m not entirely convinced it’s desirable. It’s competition, after all, that spurs innovation and advancement.

Let’s leave it at that!

If she left it at that, she would be a conservative.

We live in an imperfect world.  Not everything is equitable or fair.  Not everything ever will be, no matter how many bills we pass or lawsuits we file.  It’s pretty obvious that women will always have to choose between how much time they spend as mothers and how much time they spend as workers, and it’s probably different for every woman.  That’s fine.  That’s life.  That’s what it means to be a woman in our society.

As for Ms. Scientist who posted this link, here’s what she had to say about this:

This is one of the reasons I’m not planning on having babies (other than dogs). The hardest part, I think, is that people can’t seem to comprehend that a woman would choose NOT to have children. God forbid a woman is more than a uterus….

Sometimes it’s good that a woman chooses not to reproduce.  This is one of those situations.

I bet if this girl took her head out of her ass for a minute and questioned why it might be that people “can’t seem to comprehend that a woman would choose NOT to have children” she might get a better understanding of what “people” really mean.  By people, of course, she means other women, probably her mother.  Might it be that most people – most women, no less – describe having children as the highlight of their lives?  This has been the case for the majority of parents that I know, particularly women.

Will a life of science be fulfilling?  Maybe.  Will having babies be fulfilling?  Probably.  Will a life with a little of each be the best of both worlds?  Ms. Scientist doesn’t intend on finding out, because she is going to be the next Jane Gooddall.  Knowing a little bit more about the mating habits of gorillas is certainly a prize worth risking your genetic lineage for, right?

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