Without opening the can of worms that is gender just yet, I’ll be referring to gender in this post as the traditional binary classification, man and woman.

A 40% Enrollment Rate!11!!

Having recently graduated from undergrad, I’ve received my fair share of promotional emails from the university, advocating for women to get more into STEM, increase support groups, clubs, and initiatives that encourage women to pursue careers in STEM. While I don’t necessarily have a problem with that idea alone, its generally the motive and narrative that’s being pushed that concerns me. “We fight for equality!”, “50% across the board!”, and a miriad of other ideas I often hear on media. It gets me thinking, why is it only STEM that people are so adament about? One point of discussion that I thought of is that it lays the foundation for our modern civilization. Without scientists and mathematicians, where do us engineers get our tables to reference?

“Tier” List

Anyone who’s been on the red side of YouTube has probably seen that interview with Peterson and his bricklayer comment. It goes something like “If we want women to be represented at 50%, men make up 99% of all brick layers, why don’t we advocate for that?” I’m paraphrasing of course, but the harsh truth that seems to exist our society is the idea of a social heirarchy. STEM, government, and corporate jobs seem to be the “what makes society go round jobs”. I suppose they are pretty inportant, being responsible for the 3 pillars of society: technological advancement, law/order, and economy. So if one does believe in the social heirarchy, then Peterson’s argument is as good as swiss cheese. But I’m sure he’s aware of that undertone aswell, picking an occupation deemed as “lower” on the heirarchy to challenge that point.

The Money Incentive

If I had a nickel everytime I’ve seen a post/article about some “Woman’s only” grant, scholarship, or other funding, I’d probably have enough to buy a drink. This notion screams the concept of perverse incentive to me. Basically, an undesirable result of an initiative that attempted to improve a circumstance. It often makes it worse than situation began with. Take Compstat. In the 90’s, crime in NYC was an alltime high. One potential solution was to log every single crime, small or large, area, time, perpetrator etc into a database. A data scientist’s haven if you would. Yes, because everything was logged, NYPD was able to capture many criminals and lower the crime rate. However, since the goal is to drastically reduce crime, this may lead officers to dish out arrests, tickets and summonses to feel like they’re contributing when it wasn’t necessary. It becomes more about the statistic then the actual idea.

Back to the woman’s only club, I suppose the idea of these monetary initiatives is to incentivise women to pursue these goals “because it pays well”. On paper, I would speculatively agree that yes, this would work. People like money, so naturally, this will likely sway the numbers over time, which organizations love to boast about. But are there any reports on the actual fulfillment a woman feels by pursuing a goal purely because “it pays well?” In addition, doesn’t overaccepting for any reason pose issues in the quality of work produced? Playing purely by numbers, if you simply open the floodgates, there’s going to be seaweed, regardless of gender.

Skill Should Be the Only Metric

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the actual idea, and its actually men discriminating against women in the workplace that started it. But then again, wouldn’t that just create the Ouroboros situation? There’s probably more than meets the eye. I don’t think I’ve had a proper conversation about this matter with someone else, since anytime its brought up in conversation, its often dismissed as “bs”. That might tell me what I personally think, even though I don’t have a concrete opinion. They say you tend to gravitate to those who share the same ideas as you.

Despite this, I still believe that when deciding who’s more qualified, the skills of the individual is paramount. This includes technical and soft skills. If its a “tie”, it should be broken in other ways; previous experience, awards, side projects etc. I believe that it is honourable to only judge based on skill. Someone who is good at their craft, from circuit layup to bricklaying, shows drive, experience, dedication.

Or mabye its all a ploy from the eViL government to separate people and pit them against eachother for ease of control…

-ekd