[Wowfunhappy]

> If you're a male child interested in science and in high school right now you've been through 8 years telling you that you should not go into science because they need more women of colour who follow the right religions and have the right sexual orientation. You're constantly bombarded with "SCIENCE DOES NOT WANT MEN".

Do you have any examples of teens / young adults being discouraged from going into science because they are white and male? There are certainly some (I'd say good!) programs to encourage women and minorities, but that's quite a different thing from men being actively discouraged.

Scientific fields are still significantly more male than female, even among recent graduates.

[SamReidHughes]

> Do you have any examples of teens / young adults being discouraged from going into science because they are white and male?

I know a post-doc who was told to hire at least one female undergrad, even if there's a better man.

[v_lisivka]

> Scientific fields are still significantly more male than female, even among recent graduates.

Why "still"? Majority of mans are genetically selected to be adventurers, while minority of woman are adventurers. It's impossible to change genetics with advertising, so we will never have 50/50% split, until human genome will change. Why not just accept natural distribution?

[max76]

I'm not convinced that joining the scientific community is an adventure or that this genetic difference exists. The differences can be explained without using genetics.

For example, there is a popularly held opinion that girls are bad at math. Girls who believe they are bad at math might try less in math courses. Girls that receive lower grades in math from trying less might be intimidated by the math requirements of a science program.

[dnautics]

It's not an adventure, but it is a high-risk with a slim chance of a very high payoff endeavor, and men are typically more drawn to that than women, for example there his a huge gender disparity in fishing the Alaskan fisheries or base jumping.

[v_lisivka]

Offtopic: Can you explain to non-native English speaker, please, why "adventure" does not match "a high-risk with a slim chance of a very high payoff endeavor"? I saw "adventure in science" few times, so I assumed that someone who does this "adventure in science" can be named "adventurer". What is wrong in my conclusion?

[max76]

I wouldn't consider a career in science to be high risk. It's often easy to transfer from academic science to private engineering. Science degrees holders have respectable earnings on average.

[nine_k]

The argument I like most is that young ladies are just smarter, and don't go as much to a field that promises low pay, long hours, and doubtful prospects; they choose careers more wisely.

[scarejunba]

How does that one square with the fact that the median income for women is lower than the median income for men while the median income for all groups correlates positively with intelligence?

Seems like that kills the hypothesis that women are making better career decisions across the board optimizing for pay.

[Retric]

Pay is not the only issue when choosing a job. Job Stability, stress and work life balance are also huge factors rational actors should consider.

Science does not simply pay poorly, the job also sucks.

[Konnstann]

So does nursing, but it is heavily female-dominated.

[Retric]

“Registered nurses (RNs) made a median salary of $68,450 in 2016.” That’s not really bad pay considering you can get an associate degree which only takes 2 years, and you make above median US wages.

Being a scientist requires vastly more education, and long periods of low pay. I actually know a programmer that switched to nursing and he seems reasonably content.

[dnautics]

The reason why science sucks goes beyond pay. It's the repeated failure, long-ass hours (I once worked for 150 days straight, pulling >100 hour weeks), only to find out that in the end playing politics was more important than doing a good job at the work.

[slededit]

A life tip: Always 50/50. Talent is great, politics helps you direct it to where it will maximize impact. If nobody thinks what your working on is important you may be an unrecognized genius, but its also perfectly possible you are on the wrong track.

If you can't convince anyone what your doing is important it should make you stop and reconsider your efforts.

[dnautics]

I'm in a position where I succeed by not playing politics. Since i'm not playing politics (which others in the company are doing), i am spending my time doing development work. I am now building a team, and my only concern is to deliver results on time. My CEO thinks I'm competent and has expressed interest in helping fund me a startup, when the time comes. I'm not going to say that I didn't strategize the a politics "meta game" (picking a place to work where I would be visible, choosing to work on projects where I can have an impact) but the amount of time or effort I am spending on it is vanishingly small.

In any case my point about science is that playing politics is MORE important than delivering quality results. In my lab as a grad student, there was a grad student who delivered extremely sketchy data and then won the grad student of the year award and now he's a tenured professor at a top 50 US research institute.