Monday, September 26, 2011
I, For One, Welcome Our New Female Overlords
Via Yglesias, Kay Steiger presents this chart:
The gender gap in higher education has been noted for a while, but as Yglesias notes, the huge increase in engineering and science PhDs is significant. At some point, society will give men a good kick in the ass, causing the trend to balance out some, but until then, I think it will continue, until women are earning more than half of the doctorates in science and engineering, also. This is a development which I suspect will make my friend the Professor uncomfortable. I used to accuse him of misogyny because his 30+ disc CD collection contained exactly 0 female singers. I doubt that he'll like female faculty cramping his style.
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"I used to accuse him of misogyny because his 30+ disc CD collection contained exactly 0 female singers."
ReplyDeleteWhy should his tastes in art be subject to whims of 'you must represent each minority''? I may not like teeny bopper music, does that make me against all teenage youth?
Surprisingly, it is hard to care about claims of sexism when the only things to support this are in the realm of 'he does not care for the styles of art made by a particular subset of people'
You don't have to care about such claims, since they were made in jest. As Foghorn Leghorn would say, "That was a joke, son."
ReplyDeleteAs the alleged misogynist in question, thanks to Anonymous for making the case that actually represents reality in this situation. Spending 22 years in a relatively small radio market in the pre-internet/satellite radio 80's and early 90's, the breadth of contemporary music to which one was exposed was pretty limited - no opportunity to even hear of talented artists like Beth Orton, Jenny Lewis, P.J. Harvey, Imelda May, and Florence + the Machine that now grace the aforementioned and expanded collection.
ReplyDeleteThe entire post from A Farmer, however, seems to have been explicitly designed just to elicit a comment from the long-silent Professor since A Farmer well knows that the Professor is nothing if not a strong advocate for increasing the number of female faculty in science and engineering and is hoping that his current Ph.D. student will be counted among them in a few years.
Yes, it was a joke, and The Professor can think of maybe 5 other people in the world with enough insider information to have identified it as such. Call it a very small niche joke.
Very small niche jokes tend to come with the territory on very small niche blogs.
ReplyDeleteA Farmer appreciates that The Professor took the time to correct the record. Hopefully he took notice of the new topic label, "The Coming Robot Takeover." That's right, I'm keeping an eye out for you masters of the universe.