We know that women students and staff remain underrepresented in Higher Education STEM disciplines. Even in subjects where equivalent numbers of men and women participate, however, many women are still disadvantaged by everyday sexism. Our recent research found that women who study STEM subjects at undergraduate level in England were up to twice as likely as non-STEM students to have experienced sexism. The main perpetrators of this sexism were not university staff, however, but were men STEM degree students.
That’s the core of a STEM degree. You are constantly challenged about your conclusions. That’s not sexism, that’s how science works.
I think the issue here is that it’s the default kneejerk reaction to not take a woman’s observations or experiments as seriously as a man’s. Sexism can exist in many insidious forms that don’t necessarily need to be conscious decisions made by the perpetrator. Academic rigor is of course important, so it should stay as academic rigor and nothing more.
The default kneejerk reaction in acidemia and high level engineering in general is to do just that. For example: “The fuq, you did not get superconductivity at room temperature.”
That’s not sexism…it’s healthy skepticism, and I think the root of all this. People get questioned in the field, hard…The good scientists and engineers put up with it, because it’s appropriate, and they can defend their data.
I get the point you’re trying to make, but I’ve seen enough healthy skepticism be misconstrued as sexism to be really skeptical of these results.
That’s not what they are talking about, and it’s super fucking obvious.
Other types of sexism include disbelief when a woman explains their experiences and baselessly denying evidence they present to support their claims.
Which proves my point. I question the data, I’m a sexist pig. It’s a hard field when your data is shaky.
It’s sexist if you don’t look further into the claims, instead just relying on your immediate assumptions about them being false.
If you immediately assume women are lying about experiencing sexism, and you don’t look into it further at all, and your reasoning is based solely on them being women as opposed to men, then yeah I’d say that’s pretty sexist. I’m not sure how someone could think otherwise.
I didn’t make any assumptions. By default, the statement made in the paper is not sexist.
By making assumptions, you bring in your bias and sexism. You just made 3 or 4 to justify your position
LMFAO ok bud, nice deflection