Yeah; it's also a fact that everyone grows up in a society, and society shapes people's interests a lot. It's very difficult to tell what is biological and what is social. I find it interesting that you put scientists in quotations. Are you implying that people who publish in this field, who have years of research experience and extensive training in their field, are not real scientists? I find it extremely hard to believe that you are this ignorant of how science works. There's a reason those programs are in place, because women face discrimination in science. It's currently our best fix for this discrimination. When the discrimination is gone, the programs will also be gone.
Some differences are pretty obviously biological, so much so that they've been observed even in other primates (so we can't say that it's society's fault): Male And Female Chimps Play Differently Male Monkeys Prefer Boys' Toys Female Chimps Play With Stick Dolls I've yet to see evidence of anti-female discrimination in science, to be honest, and even if it existed, I doubt that it could be solved by flooding the labs with female students who needed to be encouraged to be there. If anything, wouldn't that just give the guys a legitimate reason to treat their female colleagues with contempt? I think that the disparity in the representation of males vs females in certain fields can be explained without having to blame sexism, and that feminists are trying to force a political solution on a non-problem (thereby creating a problem). And yeah, I don't have a lot of respect for the social sciences. It seems to me that the kind of people who flock to those studies are more interested in pushing an agenda than doing science.
Interesting articles! I'll have to get back to you when I have a chance to do an in depth reading of the original papers. Wait, so you're telling me that the only thing you've read on this subject is the Washington Post piece on the Williams & Ceci PNAS paper? I alluded to a literature containing hundreds of opposite results assuming you were familiar, but apparently not. If you want a place to start, here are some Google Scholar results for "gender discrimination bias hiring STEM". If you're unfamiliar with how to perform a deep review of the literature of a field, I'd be happy to provide some tips. This article is also a good resource. Let's walk through how the scientific process works. 1. Observe some phenomenon out I'm the world. 2. Read the litrerature of the field, and formulate a hypothesis to account for your initial observation. 3. Test this phenomenon using an appropriate methodology and statistically analyze the results. 4. Determine whether or not your hypothesis is supported by your results. 5. Write this all up and submit to a conference or an appropriate journal in the field. This is how every single scientific field works. If social scientists are undeserving of respect and are just pushing an agenda, something in the above process must be going wrong. Let's think about some possibilities: Possibility 1: Social scientists don't use the process above at all. This is demonstrably false, read and journal article and it goes through each of the steps above. Possibility 2: Social scientists do experiments, but they all fabricate their data. While technically possible, this would require an extensive conspiracy between thousands of scientists over many generations, and is extraordinarily unlikely. Possibility 3: Social scientists' studies are so methodological flawed we can't conclude anything from them. While sometimes this is true, bad methodology can happen in any field, and I'm not aware of any studies that attempt to determine whether any field is "worse" than the rest metbodologically. Let me know if you know of any! Possibility 5: Social scientists are so bad at statistics that even though they have well-designed studies they constantly find false positives and false negatives. Again, while this is possible, statistical ineptitude is a problem in a lot of fields and I know of no evidence that any field is worse than any other. Let me know if you know of any studies on this! Possibility 5: Social scientists do fine studies, but their conclusions over interpret or overgeneralize their data. Again, possible, but unclear that any field is worse than any other. Plus, this is the sort of thing that peer review us good at catching. Since you must have a principled reason to disrespect social scientists, which of these possibilities do you think is true and why? Or if you think it's something else, what is it and why?I've yet to see evidence of anti-female discrimination in science
I clicked on a few of those articles but they're all behind a paywall. Before linking to a list of articles as evidence of something, you should make sure that they're actually available to the person you're trying to "educate". And I know how the scientific process works, but I also know how people work - especially feminists. They think logic is a tool of the patriarchy.
The nice thing about Google scholar is that they often have free pdfs or articles. They'll either appear as links to the right of the search result, or there is also a link below the search result that says "All X versions", which often have free pdfs. I don't doubt you know how science works, but I wanted to lay it out explicitly so that it is easier to identify exactly where things can go wrong in science. Since you think that social scientists don't do science, you should be able to identify where you think the problem is and why it is a problem.