Ok, I was snarky. Red-handed. You caught me on a bad day, and you don’t deserve that because of course, you are right. (I gave my boss’ boss the courtesy of reading a pre-print of mine, which is about to be published. Academic freedom, and all that, means no, I don’t have to run it by him prior to publishing. After this article had gone through peer-review, editorial review and multiple changes, he had a number of completely unsoliticited comments about how to make it better.)
No, I don’t want parity for parity’s sake. A Bustle article sums up nicely how I feel; I’ve pulled a couple of quotes:
“For all that the Nobel is designed to award brilliant research done in the past, what it does for the future is equally important. The Nobel for STEM appears to be caught in a difficult cycle: it awards prestigious men, who employ men, who then have the resources to get the prize in the future. It’s a tricky problem, and one that the Nobel alone can’t address.”
And:
" … role models are a crucial part of the Nobel project; and the comparative lack of female ones reveals some very poor things about the world."
All true, but 2 wrongs don’t make a right, I don’t think we want affirmative action in the Nobels. You flog the role models you have. I mentioned above my son’s Hero Project was Dylan, my daughter’s was Marie Curie. But she has since turned to snarky writing, and I’ve given her Merrill Markoe and Fran Liebowitz to read.
The best quote I found in the Bustle piece is the notion that the Nobels can’t solve this alone. The minority of women in STEM fields remains relatively constant, or at least growing at such a small rate as to elicit real concern, and Marie Curie won her last Nobel in 1911.
The answer is in Middle School teaching, I think HS is too late. And that’s a whole nother subject. But personally I don’t see it, my kids are in a STEM oriented magnet HS and there’s more girls than boys. Something like 1/4 of the graduates (mostly from immigrant families) end up studying STEM fields at Rutgers, and save a year’s tuition from the APs taken here.
The gender disparities begin to appear in higher education and then rapidly grow more disparate the higher you go (i.e., the number of professors teaching in STEM disciplines, who then get the grants, who then go on to win Nobels). It is, of course, very encouraging that in secondary education the numbers are roughly equivalent, but it is equally worrisome that something happens along the way so that women are not equally represented in the workforce (not just professors in higher ed, but across the workforce). It is incumbent upon us to ask why? What happens between middle and high school through college and into the workforce? Why does this disparity continue?
It is also worth noting that race and ethicity are critical points in any discussion about equal representation in STEM.
The only STEM career disaster story I know of personally is my sister, who managed to blow her own foot off careerwise after getting a DVM/PhD in her 30’s. She married a local so was unable to widely apply for teaching positions when the university failed to hire her. She currently lectures internationally but can barely make a living.
I truly am sorry for your sister – that is awful. Promising careers cut short like that are tragic, regardless of gender, and the academic life can be very, very cruel.
This is a heartbreaking article, and it is from 2014.
Just a taste: “Senior computer science major here, it’s sad I’m usually the only girl in my class. The feeling of isolation is what pushes a lot of girls away.”
Note that is is from 2014, so she was a senior in college. That was two years ago and she’s now in the workforce. Wonder how she feels now?
And with this comment, I feel as if I’ve exhausted whatever debate I had in me.
So they could add music, though as @gellfex indicates, it would not come from the original endowment system. I don’t see a reason why not to do that, though.
I’m sure the nobel prize can drum up it’s own funds and can pull from some deep pockets. I could see both Woz or Allen ponying up, though, as they both seem to take music seriously.
(I gave my boss’ boss the courtesy of reading a pre-print of mine, which is about to be published. Academic freedom, and all that, means no, I don’t have to run it by him prior to publishing. After this article had gone through peer-review, editorial review and multiple changes, he had a number of completely unsoliticited comments about how to make it better.)
