<p>Thanks! 
I actually defended the day of Hurricane Sandy. It was a bit of a mess.</p>
<p>On Slateâs website âNobody Ever Says âYou Only Got Into MIT Because Youâre an Asian Manââ seems to be an alternate title for the article. The implication is seemingly that this is because of racism/sexism but a better answer would be because it would ludicrous to think someone got into MIT because they were an Asian man. Yet evidence from studies such as Espenshade and Chung as well as the experiences of Caltech and the UCs suggests that a large fraction of minority students and perhaps a small fraction of female students would not be at MIT in the absence racial/gender preferences (I know MIT denies favoring female students but the perception that MIT does is widespread). There is also some empirical support that affirmative action undermines the signalling values of elite degrees for students who are perceived to have benefited from it and that this is turn decreases enrollment among students in the group that benefits from affirmative action AND who would have been admitted in the absence of affirmative action (see <a href=âhttp://econ.ucsd.edu/~kantonov/chilling_effect_2012_09_25.pdfâ>http://econ.ucsd.edu/~kantonov/chilling_effect_2012_09_25.pdf</a>).</p>
<p>I think thereâs a conflation, both here and in the popular mind, between âwould not be here if notâ and âdoes not deserve to be hereâ. </p>
<p>If you extend Philâs argument a little, you might consider the following. Sure, no one would tell Phil that he only got into MIT because heâs an Asian male. And you and the wider public might opine thatâs because itâs âludicrousâ to think. But Phil is making the point that being an Asian male has given him extra points in life â points that minorities and women (and minority women!) donât get automatically. But those points arenât awarded to him in the popular consciousness because he actually deserved them, they were awarded on the basis of his conforming to a positive stereotype. He got some of those points before he set foot on campus, and no doubt having those points helped him get into MIT.</p>
<p>The science fiction writer John Scalzi wrote an interesting piece a while back comparing going through life as a straight white male to playing a video game on the easiest difficulty setting. Sure, you accumulate a certain number of points at the end of the game, but if youâre trying to admit people to college based on how well they play, or what their potential is for becoming a high scorer, you would be wise to consider both high scorers on the easy difficulty level as well as those who scored well, even if slightly lower in the absolute sense, on a tougher difficulty setting.</p>
<p>After last nightâs State of the Union address someone posted this to my fb account. I was wondering how would you guys respond.
<a href=âThe Female Wage Gap Is a Major Economic Myth | RealClearMarketsâ>http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2012/11/05/the_female_wage_gap_is_a_major_economic_myth_99969.html</a></p>
<p>Maybe this will be helpful:
<a href=â5 Myths About The Gender Wage Gap Debunked | HuffPost Impactâ>http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/4646022</a></p>
<p>Those are both ridiculously strident, one-sided advocacy pieces.</p>
<p>I think, to understand the problem, it helps to focus on some of the points made in the right-wing essay:</p>
<p>-- The 23% wage gap reflects differences in career choices, education, and hours worked. Thatâs true â 23% makes a great headline, but if you adjust it for job, training, longevity, and hours, the gap is âonlyâ 5-7%. But, guess what?, 5-7% is a pretty big gap when you are talking about huge numbers of people in all sorts of different jobs. And that buries the question why women are responding differently than men to the economic signals of what careers and training are more valuable, and also why, historically, as women fill a greater percentage of a particular class of jobs, the pay for those jobs declines relative to other jobs.</p>
<p>-- The remaining gap is explicable by socio-cultural factors, not intentional discrimination. Well, duh! No one claims that there is some central cabal of men reducing the pay for each position taken by a woman, just to hold them down. âSocio-cultural factorsâ can cover a whole lot of territory, like whether women feel able to negotiate for higher pay to the same extent as men, or whether women feel able to socialize with their supervisors to the same extent, or whether they value regular hours more because they have primary responsibility for child care.</p>
<p>-- A big portion of the 23% gap relates to choices around childbearing and child raising. Of course thatâs true, and it will probably remain true no matter what happens with the kinds of proposals being debated politically. It does raise an important question, though: Childbearing and child raising are clear social goods, which provide benefits to everyone in our society? So why is it OK that the women who do it bear the economic cost of it disproportionately? Again, that question isnât really even on the table in real-world politics, but I think itâs a valid question to consider.</p>
<p>-- Never-married women past childbearing years who work full time out-earn never-married men of the same age who work full time by 9%. Yay! If you comb through demographic information, you can find some small subset of the working population where women out-earn men! (And do you want to bet that the gap goes away if you look at people doing the same work?) I care a lot more about the data that show that women graduating from college with STEM degrees earn less than their male classmates with the same majors. Itâs not anything like 23% less, of course, but it shows that there are still some powerful âsocio-culturalâ forces suppressing womenâs compensation that arenât as simple as education, career field, and having children.</p>
<p>In the veterinary profession, women make 30% less than their male counterparts. As this profession transitions to almost all women, the average wage is going down down down. The male vets I know that have hired women have said they offer them far less compensation because they accept it. Simple as that. Just another observation.</p>
<p>JHS,</p>
<p>The realclearpolitics piece is clearly an advocacy piece. The last sentence makes that clear. âClass, gender, and racial victimhood pay big dividends for politicians, but only if gullible, ill-informed citizens buy false rhetoric like the female wage gap.â While we can discuss the level of the female wage gap, and what the best solution is, but pretending this issue does not exist is just dishonest. </p>
<p>In contrast, I donât see why pointing out some of the myths that people raise about the female wage gap makes it ridiculously one sided. While the 23% may well be overstated, there is really no question that there is, in fact, a female wage gap, and that a portion of it is caused by cultural biases and beliefs.</p>
<p>What is frustrating to me is that, when it comes to this type of issue, opponents are very good at arguing that the issue is just made up, attacking the facts and evidence, and reciting cliches like âlife isnât fair.â Through denial and focussing all of the discussion on challenging each fact or bit of evidence, they are able to effectively filibuster any discussion about what can be done about an important problem.</p>
<p>Uglymom,</p>
<p>Most people cherry-pick information to see what they want to see. It is probably not worth responding to unless the person is honestly open to science, evidence and reason. </p>
<p>However, if they were interested in an honest discussion, they would not have posted a Republican propaganda piece written by a high school teacher (really), that ends by calling people who are concerned about this issue âgullible and ill-informed citizens.â That is not the type of rhetorical phrasing that is conducive to honest discussion. That article is just intended to preach to the right wing choir, and stir up the level of fear and anger in their base.</p>
<p>Much2learn, Thank you so much. Your link was very helpful. Specifically, it linked to a very thorough study that clearly compared careers and earnings by gender. You are right the first article was clearly ridiculous, insisting that if you compare apples to apples a study shows that women in urban cities 22-30 years old are actually out earning men in that age category. On close look at that actual study you see that the reason is because women in those cities are going to and graduating from college in much higher numbers. Not sure how comparing men who donât graduate college to women who do is comparing apples to apples, but the author of the article leaves that out, since itâs the only way to prove his point. </p>
<p>Parent 1337 notes that women veterinarians accept lower pay. Some years ago I read a business study that demonstrated women accept lower pay because there are higher social costs to them demanding higher pay. I have seen those costs in my own career when I demand higher pay. I will continue to push for higher pay, but the push is evaluated differently for men and women.</p>
<p>so appreciated this article. Thank you for sharing.</p>
<p>I just read this thread; for women considering applying to MIT, I want you to know that two current women undergraduate students I know both say that MIT is an excellent, non-discriminatory climate for women. I suggest you ask this of current students during the application process if it is a concern. I notice that molliebatmit also concurs that MIT was gender friendly, and that bias she felt came at another institution whose once-president infamously started his walk out the door for sharing his belief that women are genetically less intelligent than men. And, speaking of molliebatmit, (congratulations on your doctorate!) since when do women live in MagGregor, as you state in your first post?</p>
<p>MacGregor has always been coed.</p>
<p>I donât think thatâs a fair assessment to say that there was bias at Mollieâs other institution. I thought that people just had given her advice on how to avoid gender-specific bias. Perhaps there were other things Mollie didnât mention.</p>
<p>MacGregor hasnât always been co-ed â it was originally all-men. 
@ItsJustSchool, I think it went co-ed in the 80s.</p>
<p>Just to be exceedingly clear, I never felt that I was being judged for my gender at MIT, nor for my gender presentation â I fall fairly heavily toward the âfeminineâ end of the spectrum, what with the cheerleading and all, and I like to wear dresses and makeup and unsensible shoes. Of all possible places in the world, I think MIT is pretty gender-egalitarian, mostly because people donât generally give a fig about your gender or your gender presentation as long as you can help solve problem #4 on this weekâs 8.02 pset. </p>
<p>But I also think these issues exist in science, both for girls prior to college and for women in graduate school and in technical careers. And my thoughts are backed up by a tremendous amount of social science research suggesting that, when people with privilege of all flavors assume they got where they are by being awesome, and that people without privilege are just inherently less awesome, they are wrong.</p>
<p>I did see an article somewhere recently (maybe linked from Reddit?) by a female MIT alum who said she had been told by male classmates that sheâd only been admitted because sheâs a girl, and I was horrified â that is not that MIT that I know. Nobody ever said anything like that to me or my friends. But maybe they just didnât have the stones.</p>
<p>I recently went to the MIT career fair - from a recruiting side. A male student walked up to our booth. I started talking to him, and he said âI donât want to talk to a recruiter, I want to talk to an engineer.â</p>
<p>Iâll note that it said âengineerâ pretty clearly on my badge.</p>
<p>MIT isnât immune from sexism, and it comes out in different ways. But it is much more subtle and much weaker, as a whole, compared to what STEM fields in general seem to have.</p>
<p>Women often elect a âmommy trackâ when they have children which would lower income. Even if it is not an explicit choice, it shows in what they put into the job I was looking at stats for female consultants, and yes, for the same positions, they did earn less which initially looks like gender discrimination. But when you look at what the revenues are that the women brought into the company, you can see why this discrepancy exists. A lot of the pay matrix depends upon the revenue generated. The women did not bring in as much as a rule, and one reason is the time one has to put into the job to get that revenue. The women simply cannot do it and involve themselves with their family, children and home as they would like to do. SOmething has to go. </p>
<p>Because I was pretty much a SAHM, my husband could cherry pick things he did with the kids and I heavily took the brunt of anything happening, going on at home and with the children. This allowed him to put in crazy hours that no one could do and raise chiildren, without someone taking care of home matters and choreographing opportunities to spend quality time with the children. Some of his colleague were single moms, and they had their hands so full, that they had very little down time THe single dads in my day did not tend to have primary custody, so they simply had to juggle less time with the kids and have more to spend on work. </p>
<p>@collegealum314, MacGregor certainly was originally all-male. </p>
<p>âI donât think thatâs a fair assessment to say that there was bias at Mollieâs other institution. I thought that people just had given her advice on how to avoid gender-specific bias.â</p>
<p>Perhaps I read post #38 incorrectly. I donât think so. My point is that for high-school women concerned about gender bias in their college selection process, MIT seems to be a place worth considering. I am not trying to make any points about any other institutions.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>@cptofthehouse - How does your paternal leave compare with your maternal leave? Are men and women only 9 months to a year behind in terms of income? Why should women shoulder more of the childrearing burden then men?</p>
<p>Piper, women SHOULD not have to shoulder more of the childrearing burden than me. The fact of the matter is that they do. Even when there is paternal leave equal to maternal leave, the women tend to take more. When you have something growing in your body for all of that time, there is some physical, primal, emotional attachment that understandably is there that did not happen with males. To discount that is leaving an important part of real life out. </p>
<p>Itâs not just 9 months. Many women choose to breast feed, and pumping often does not work well. They also find they WANT to spend more time with that baby. DH and I made nearly the exact same $ amount the year before my first child was born. I took one look at that baby, and I did not want to go back to work, and only did so because we had taken on financial obligations that needed my income, and had made the plans to return. I could not wait to reduce my hours to spend time with that sweet infant, and the only reason I continued working was because the extra income could buy a nicer environment and things for him that I wanted. As soon as DH was making enough that I felt we could do fine on his income alone, I quit. And that was after scaling back hours and I was working part time by then. My mind was no longer on my work as it was. I wanted to go home with my baby, and had plans of things to do with him for him. DH loved his son just as much, but his mind did not go where mine did. He focused on his job and moved up those early years, making more money which allowed me to ultimately stay home as we had more children. And I was pretty typical of a number of highly educated women in âgoodâ jobs.</p>
<p>My SIL is the primary wage earner in her family and has a high powered job which leaves my brother with the kids more than she can be with them. Itâ has its societal drawback. Heâs not invited to a lot of private mom events, and there is that pause parents have about letting their little girls go to a classmateâs house where itâs dad who is at home, not a mom. Even in this day and age, heâs not the norm, and there are ramifications of their decision. He has to take extra steps to make sure of inclusion, and is still left out. Often his wife is invited over him, when itâs clear who is taking care of the kids most of the time. </p>
<p>My friendâs DD is the primary wage earner, but she also is the one spearheading her childrenâs activities Her husband just doesnât have the same degree of interest, and if she wants her kids to be involved in certain things or have them, she has to be involved. Itâs hurting time and focus on her job, she freely admits, and she also wished to stay home with the kids, oh, she so wants that, but the financial hit would be too much. My friend who helps out with her grandchildren says that her SIL, though a wonderful person who loves his children dearly, is just not as "with it " when it comes to dressing the children and their care. This is typical.</p>
<p>So taking 1000 men and women of equal job earnings and with children, the way I see it right now is that more women then men would give up more time, money, focus from work for their children. Not just 9 months, thatâs practically incidental in the time span of raising a child, but the lifetime of the child It is a life long commitment.</p>
<p>I will add that things are changing from back when I was a mom to small children and children in K12. But even with my last child in hgh school, the momâs club there has more going on more members by about 5 fold than the dads. Not even close. The same goes for a number of schools in the area. Look and see who is picking up the kids, dropping off the kids, is showing up at the parent activities. And who is helping out on extra curricular activities. When it comes to certain activities, itâs nearly all moms. And still, more moms are part time or they are not primary wage earners than dads. Though one sees a lot more parental involvment, I will say, these days, But still, itâs pretty clear that more women are making this choice to spend time with their children that has to come from somewhere, than menâŠ</p>
<p>So itâs not the âSHOULDâ but what the actuality is.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Well, women also donât generally take time off at the beginning of their pregnancy 
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I think youâre right, and weâre closer to the same page than I thought.</p>
<p>I also think that this is very strongly cultural â the balance men and women strike in childrearing varies <em>widely</em> across cultures. I think companies could do something to improve this, not by just encouraging women to have careers, but by encouraging men to have a better work-life balance. </p>