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Comment by clarkevans | Hacker News Reader

I believe that PhD graduation in STEM is close to 50/50% now, yet, female tenured faculty in STEM is closer to 20-30%. If an organization wishes to have an equal gender representation in its faculty, wouldn't a short term hiring preference be a reasonable thing to do? There is certainly no lack of qualified candidates these days.

Even so, there's another aspect here -- service. Women are disproportionally assigned service roles in academic departments (men eschew such assignments if they can). Hence, existing male staff may prefer to tenure female colleagues to reduce their own future service burden.

Sexism (in this conversation meaning male preferential treatment) is still quite an issue in academia.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/12/new_study_fin...

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Is it common in academia for sexism to be defined as male preferential treatment?

In a male dominated field, no.

In a female dominated field, such as nursing or primary education, sexism to many has the opposite meaning. For example, there is lots of sexism regarding "house-husbands". I have a charming gentleman who babysits my daughter, he was very worried about sexism, and, well, for good reason.

> If an organization wishes to have an equal gender representation in its faculty, wouldn't a short term hiring preference be a reasonable thing to do?

No. That's discrimination against males.

> Sexism (in this conversation meaning male preferential treatment) is still quite an issue in academia.

Yes. It's now swung the other way!

It might also make sense for a university's administration to prefer women -- for the same position, women currently make, on average, 10-20% less than their male counterparts. That adds up. Surely, you'd consider the wage differential as part of your hiring decision?

That's an entirely different argument. On the whole, the wage gap is a myth[0]. If there's a particular situation where someone is willing to do the same work for less pay, then the university should absolutely hire them.

They should hire all women, and become the most cost-effective university. The same goes for businesses. Imagine an increase in profits of around 10-20%. An all-women company would be staggeringly profitable.

That doesn't happen. Because? The wage gap is a myth.

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[0] Example, http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-wage-gap-myth-that-wont-die-...

You're going to get downvoted for this. The same comment from the opposite perspective wouldn't.

This community likes to think of itself as enlightened. I wonder why we find these kinds of issues so hard to face.

HN is more liberal and progressive in the true meaning of the word rather than the SJW interpretation of it these days.

While plenty of people still use the downvote button as a censorship tool (and in HN it's actual censorship due to 10 votes kill) many have stopped and you see much more non-politically correct arguments being accepted and debated on HN these days.

Downvoting is also an often herd like mentality once you go grey you are most likely to be vote killed or close to it within minutes. But on the other hand there are much more -1 <-> +1 fights these days, pretty much the only thing that will get you vote killed these days is talking about "privacy" related things and even that is more open to a debate than it was even 6 months ago.

I disagree about the men eschewing service roles, I haven't seen any clear gender line opinions about them.

This strikes me as delving dangerously far into assigning motives to a group of people when looking at symptoms.

You're correct, my statement is unnecessarily argumentative. Thank you.

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