Perception hole

From a comment:

Anonymous said...
"My point in #3 and 5 is not that men don't care about these things, absolutely they do. But women drop out in disproportionate numbers, and these are some of the reasons they cite."

Wait a second. Why would women drop out at disproportionate rates due to lack of money and job security?

In fact, if patriarchy is the norm (as you suggest), don't you think women have LESS pressure to earn well and have good jobs? Shouldn't this make it easier for them to adjust to the lesser pay and lower job security? In the patriarchal system, women don't have to be breadwinners and hence they can afford to pursue science almost along the lines as a hobby.

Contradiction.
.............................................

Woooooooooooooooo boy. We got some work to do here.

I'm going to take a stab at this, and hopefully some others will write in the comments here as well.

Assumption 1a: That "patriarchy" means men take care of women

TRUE and FALSE.

TRUE. The definition of the word patriarchy includes "a family headed by a man".

FALSE. Because not all women want to be or are taken care of by men; similarly not all men take care of or want to take care of women.

Assumption 1b: so women don't want to or need to work.

FALSE. Patriarchy has two other definitions, which are the ones more relevant to the point I raised (although I did not use the word patriarchy, you did).

As you can read here in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, patriarchy also means control by men of a disproportionately large share of power and a society or institution organized according to the principles or practices of patriarchy.

Although you could argue that nobody wants to work, I think you'll have to agree that if nobody is taking care of you, you need to work.

Most of us fall into that last category. We need the income. Also, there are various benefits to working besides just paying the bills. Being denied a career means being denied all of the fulfillment and stimulation of

a) an intellectual environment
b) making tangible progress and
c) getting feedback when you make significant contributions.

Assumption 2: That women should want to pursue science as a hobby.

I guess you're also assuming within this that most men who pursue science as a career would also want it as a hobby if they could afford to do that?

But in your version, women can do science as a hobby, but men don't have to??

So let's break it down.

FALSE: Science as a hobby

My type of science can't be done outside a university or a company. It is too expensive. It is unsafe. I can't do it at home in my basement. This is not just true for me because I am a woman; it is true for everyone in my field. We have to have careers in science if we want to do science at all. That's just the way it is.

And as I think I have written extensively here before, I want to direct my own project(s). I don't want someone else telling me what to do. So this means science is a full-time job for me. Not a hobby.

I want job security just as much as the next guy. Being a woman does not make it easier for me or any of my friends to "adjust" to being paid badly and not knowing where I'll be from year to year.

And in the current economy, in the current world, most everyone I know needs two incomes. So yes, women worry a lot about finances and job security because they want to have kids and own a house and take care of their parents and siblings when they get ill. Not less than men; maybe even more than men, if the statistics of why women leave disproportionately are any indication.

My personal impression is that women worry more and feel more pressure from our own parents to "settle down" in a secure, stable situation.

Men are allowed, in our society, to take more risks and take longer doing it.

If I want to have kids, I have only a few more years to decide that I want to do it. Men have more time to play around. That's biology working against us.

So by that logic, if anything, we should let everyone go through grad school and postdoc and get a job as fast as they can, but especially women if they can and want to.

But we don't even take that into account.

We're stuck with an incredibly inefficient, patriarchal system that wastes everybody's time and drives most women to run screaming from science as a career. I could have done ten times more science by now if not for the inefficiencies in the system.

This is why almost all of my friends left academic science for industry science. They felt it was possible working in industry to make more progress more quickly; get paid what they are worth; work more reasonable hours (because they can get more done in less time!); and potentially move up more easily (although this last part is actually not the case).

Women leave disproportionately because academic science is still based on a patriarchal system that doesn't work for us. Which isn't to say that science is working all that well for most men, either- I think the pipeline numbers show very clearly that it only works for a tiny minority of people, and the vast majority of those who major in science end up leaving for other career paths.