I don't think there are really enough details on the parent comment to judge it either way, but can't you at least see how weird it is that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly? Whether or not white men have hidden advantages over non white men (and I'm not saying that they don't! Simply that they are not clearly visible), it should be very clear that there are large non hidden advantages for non white / non male people, which is obviously going to foster discontent, whether or not they are actually at a disadvantage in the big picture.
As a similar example: my close Vietnamese friend met all of his best friends and girlfriend in college in VSA, a Vietnamese club. All of my non white friends went to 'Latinos in X' 'Asians in X' etc. clubs. There were no equivalents for me! I don't resent anybody for this (by dint of my personality I don't really care), and in truth it was probably good for my cold networking skills (perhaps widening the unseen advantage gap that I supposedly have even further), but I also think it's difficult to look at this and not understand why people are so discontent with DEI identity politics.
Maybe I wasn't clear in my previous comment about what exactly rubs me the wrong way, so here's an analogy: imagine you went to school and the the teacher lined everyone up by gender and handed out a cookie to everyone. And then she handed out two extra cookies to all of the girls! You would be annoyed! Does it matter that back at home guys normally get 4 extra cookies every day? No, because as a guy, you don't see or know this! (In this world brothers don't have sisters and vice versa). And even if you do technically know this because you've heard about it, you don't really viscerally understand it because it's not really your lived in experience.
So what is the solution? I can't say I know. But I do know that these things very much breed discontentment and it is at the very least important to recognize why.
I think a hallmark of 2025 is a resounding lack of empathy and compassion from people. Maybe's it's smartphones, social media, or some sort of existential doomerism.
To reframe your scenario: imagine you went to a school and some of your classmates came from poor families and couldn't afford clothes, food, or a laptop etc. To help those students, the teacher used class funds to buy them new shoes and get them a nice laptop to get their work done. Do you still think it's unfair that you don't get new shoes, laptop, or cookies?
The solution to your original question is to understand why the teacher is giving girls 4 cookies and then just be happy that more people get a fair shot at life.
I feel like you're glossing over my main point, which is that this stuff 100% does breed resentment for the average person, which is how we end up with people like Trump (obviously there are many more factors to consider but this is definitely one of them).
The difference between your scenario is just how visible it is; I have never ever had somebody go up to me and say 'This opportunity is being given to you because you're a white male'! If anything, it's the opposite! Did you know I was not eligible _to apply_ for a single scholarship for college a few years back, solely based on my race and gender? It was pretty demoralizing!
Again, I'm not saying that I _haven't_ benefitted from being a white male in some indescribable unknown way; but unlike in your scenario, I cannot _see_ this. Think about the average person, who goes their whole life seeing others being handed stuff specifically because of their race and gender and when they complain about it they simply get told 'Do you have no empathy? Your life is much better off than theirs!'
Again, who knows what the right solution is. But I don't think that it's the status quo.
> I feel like you're glossing over my main point, which is that this stuff 100% does breed resentment for the average person, which is how we end up with people like Trump (obviously there are many more factors to consider but this is definitely one of them).
I mean, having to cater to the feelings of overly sensitive men is how most of these problems started in the first place.
Ack! There is nothing 'overly sensitive' about being annoyed when you see somebody else get an opportunity because of the color of their skin or gender. It's human nature! In fact I suspect the average person in favor of DEI and / or identity politics would still suffer a decent amount of cognitive dissonance if they were passed up because of something like this. Again, it's just human nature!
Please try to imagine advocating for women's rights 100 years ago and hearing somebody say something like 'overly sensitive women want to vote! Psh!' If you want to argue for DEI please try to present good faith arguments.
Personally, I don't really get butthurt about things, so this isn't a problem for me (although I do think it's a problem in general as it is obviously going to anger people). I do think one of the main problems with DEI is that it attempts to address the symptoms instead of the root cause of the problem. I.e. trying to get girls into stem / coding in highschool or college instead of figuring out why they're less interested in it from a much younger age (and if that's even a problem; classic nature vs nurture problem).
You just wrote a whole bunch of paragraphs talking about how appearances made you feel things without ever addressing the actual facts.
>DEI is that it attempts to address the symptoms instead of the root cause of the problem. I.e. trying to get girls into stem / coding in highschool or college instead of figuring out why they're less interested in it from a much younger age (and if that's even a problem; classic nature vs nurture problem).
Except there are DEI initiatives that look at every level.
Being in favor of the status quo is pretty easy, I admit, and hey, if you happen to benefit disproportionately from the status quo, bonus, right?
> You just wrote a whole bunch of paragraphs talking about how appearances made you feel things without ever addressing the actual facts.
Yes, appearances matter! That's why Trump is president right now (a fact, in case it isn't clear, I'm not happy about)! Because the American people were unhappy with the status quo. Whether or not you think DEI is "fair". And when people like you ignore this, you alienate the voting class, which you need on your side!
> Except there are DEI initiatives that look at every level.
No, there are not DEI initiatives for pre kindergarten / very early school. Not that I've heard of at least, and definitely not on a large scale. And I'm not even talking about adding DEI there; I'm simply saying that we should really be asking why the gap between men and women in STEM seems to start so young (and if it really is because of something that hurts girls, remove that. Which would still not be DEI!)
> Being in favor of the status quo is pretty easy, I admit, and hey, if you happen to benefit disproportionately from the status quo, bonus, right?
...what? I am arguing against the current status quo. And it's true, it would be beneficial to me for DEI to be removed / identity politics abolished. I also believe it would be beneficial to everyone (albeit to a lesser extent), but that's beyond the scope of this argument.
Imagine the teacher lines up all the kids, gives them cookies, notices all the kids are boys, so the teacher puts up a sign outside the girls restroom advertising free cookies for anyone who attends math class.
Now the boys have cookies and the girls have cookies.
Except the cookies are not actually cookies, they just represent what you'll learn by attending the class.
That is out reach.
I don't see jocks complaining about fitness outreach programs to geeks. That'd be absurd.
But guys famously will complain about:
1. Women reading science fiction
2. Women watching science fiction on TV.
3. Women playing d&d
4. Women playing online games
5. Women writing code.
To be fair, many women are judgemental about male nurses or even male teachers.
That type of idiocy has to stop both ways. Let people do what they want to do.
> But guys famously will complain about:
> 1. Women reading science fiction
> 2. Women watching science fiction on TV.
> 3. Women playing d&d
> 4. Women playing online games
> 5. Women writing code.
In your head? The first two are specially absurd. How would anyone know what women watch or read in their houses?
As soon as women try to participate in fandom or attend conventions, they are derided as not being "real fans". This has been documented as a problem with geek culture for well over 50+ years.
If boys always get 4 cookies at home, and girls get none, and then we go to school and boys get 1 more cookie, and girls get 3 cookies, I'd think it was pretty weird that boys get 5 cookies and girls only get 3.
> No, because as a guy, you don't see or know this! (In this world brothers don't have sisters and vice versa).
In our world, men do know that women face barriers to entering STEM education and STEM careers that men do not face. Many men seem to ignore that fact, though, or pretend it's not true, and I will continue to roll my eyes at their annoyance about "Women in STEM" programs.
> If you include biological and medical sciences in STEM
Biological sciences are STEM of course. But if we're going to extend the definition, why not include all fields that involve technical skills? How about accountants and lawyers?
I'm concerned that you only proposed adding medical and nursing students because it's the only additional field that would support your argument. That strikes me as goalpost moving, so I hope it was just an omission.
Accounting and law schools are also graduating majority women these days. Have you not been paying attention?
DEI keeps on saying "more women in universities! More women in universities!" even though universities have been majority women for decades now. It's a one way ratchet that never stops.
Women were marginalized for millenia. Your mother/grandmother wasn't allowed to open her own bank account until 1974. It will take a long time to correct for that. It's a ratchet from the perspective of our very brief lives.
What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?
It was legal and common to discriminate on the basis of sex in banking services until 1974. I actually don't see anything in your link that disputes that. It discusses some earlier milestones about women being able to own certain types of property.
Even if we quibble about the dates involved, we all understand that historically women have been marginalized, denied property, voting, and other rights, and that this was the status quo for millenia, right? And that that has lasting effects that continue in our society?
> Your mother/grandmother wasn't allowed to open her own bank account until 1974.
And your father/grandfather was enslaved by the government to fight in the Vietnam war until 1975.
> What's the theory of harm here? If we continue educating women they may gain too much social mobility?
Blatant hypocrisy, you think 60% of college students being women is good, but consider it horrible sexism that at one time 60% of college students were men.
You don't want equality, you just want everything to be female dominated.
I actually don't care what the makeup of college students is. It's useful to encourage women to pursue education in order to promote equity. But there isn't some magic proportion of men to women graduates that I think we should be pursuing.
I don't want everything dominated by women, I just recognize that the work of undoing their marginalization is not complete.
If that's not your position, clarify what it is. You're complaining about efforts to encourage women to seek an education. What is the theory of harm, if not that women shouldn't be educated? Perhaps what I said was too snarky of inflammatory, but I genuinely don't understand what else it would be.
> Where is the DEI for men in the female dominated STEM subjects?
There’s actually quite a bit of outreach-type programs aimed at getting them in the door, and a lot less after that because despite women dominating degrees and entry-level hires, men still disproportionately dominate management and leadership roles.
> Where is the DEI for men in the female dominated STEM subjects?
Is that rhetorical? Have you looked, or just assumed their absence?
My cursory search seems to indicate that there are some, although I don't have bandwidth to investigate in any depth and I'm not sure just what criteria you'd want to use for qualification.
Where is your data showing those programs don’t exist? For example, conservatives like to talk about the plight of male nurses but even a cursory search shows that there are exactly the kind of programs you’d expect to find.
What's the equivalent of "Girls Who Code" - "Boys Who Nurse"? A club teaching First Aid to boys only? Does it exist at the same scale that Girls Who Code does?
> Only 12% of the nurses providing patient care at hospitals and health clinics today are men. Although the percentage of nurses has increased — men made up just 2.7% of nurses in 1970 — nursing is still considered a “pink collar” profession, a female-dominated field.
> A critical shortage of male teachers continues to affect K-12 education across America, with men making up just 23% of elementary and secondary school teachers today, down from 30% in 1987, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Belmont University's College of Education is addressing this gender gap through intentional recruitment, mentorship and innovative program design.
These people are very disconnected from reality. They make wild claims like groups for men are illegal and you’d never see a group dedicated to helping men in the nursing field. The feminists would destroy it! And yet…
It’s really telling how they’re just so confident about easily debunked claims.
I’m reminded of a retired college admissions administrator whose theory was that some of the men in college gap was over-confidence: statistically the women who applied overall were far closer to the women who were accepted, whereas like a third of their male applicants had no chance so a roughly even balance of applicants turned 2:1 in favor of women being accepted. I’m sure that many of them grumble about DEI, unaware that merit is _why_ they weren’t accepted whereas their fathers’ generation would’ve found room for many of them via legacy or sports spots.
> Gender discrimination is often regarded as an important driver of women’s disadvantage in the labour market, yet earlier studies show mixed results. However, because different studies employ different research designs, the estimates of discrimination cannot be compared across countries. By utilizing data from the first harmonized comparative field experiment on gender discrimination in hiring in six countries, we can directly compare employers’ callbacks to fictitious male and female applicants. The countries included vary in a number of key institutional, economic, and cultural dimensions, yet we found no sign of discrimination against women. This cross-national finding constitutes an important and robust piece of evidence. Second, we found discrimination against men in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and no discrimination against men in Norway and the United States. However, in the pooled data the gender gradient hardly differs across countries. Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, ceteris paribus, while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.
> Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.
> both scientists and laypeople overestimated the continuation of bias against female candidates. Instead, selection bias in favor of male over female candidates was eliminated and, if anything, slightly reversed in sign starting in 2009 for mixed-gender and male-stereotypical jobs in our sample. Forecasters further failed to anticipate that discrimination against male candidates for stereotypically female jobs would remain stable across the decades.
> that 'Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly
That's because, in general, STEM itself is already a "Men in STEM" program. We men don't need a program to get us excited about pursuing STEM education & careers; that pursuit is already there, and already common. It goes back to innocuous-seeming things as young boys being given chemistry kits for their birthday, while young girls are given dolls, and continues all the way through teen years as boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls, culminating in STEM careers being already full of men with conscious or unconscious biases against women.
Creating a "Men in STEM" program would be a waste of time, and would just be about scoring conservative political points.
Your argument is based on the fact that more men naturally gravitate towards STEM than women do. This doesn't mean there aren't still men who could go into STEM but lack motivation/opportunity/some other push. Maybe there are more of them than there is women like that, maybe not.
You are saying it's ok to ignore all those men just because already bigger % of men naturally go into STEM. This is just discriminatory. Just because some people sharing some characteristic with me do better (in this context) doesn't mean I am in position to do better.
This is the mistake DEI proponents make. There is no "we men", there are individuals and discriminating towards them is not ok and also illegal.
> We men don't need a program to get us excited about pursuing STEM education & careers; that pursuit is already there, and already common. It goes back to innocuous-seeming things as young boys being given chemistry kits for their birthday, while young girls are given dolls, and continues all the way through teen years as boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls, culminating in STEM careers being already full of men with conscious or unconscious biases against women.
I don't believe this is true. I think the gendered difference in interest in the cluster of topics we label "STEM" is mostly biological and deeply-seated - one piece of evidence I find very convincing is the observation that non-human primates exhibit the same sorts of gendered behavior with toys that human children do (females wanting to treat any kind of toy as a doll, males wanting to treat any kind of toy as a tool, etc.).
I also don't think that boys are encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in greater numbers than girls. I think that girls are explicitly encouraged to pursue STEM-related coursework in much greater numbers than boys - this is exactly a consequence of the above-noted social fact that "Women in STEM' is very accepted but a 'Men in STEM' program would never fly". And as you say, this is because males are much more likely to be intrinsically interested in pursuing STEM education and careers, whereas females are more likely to require explicit societal encouragement to do so. I've read more than one account of a woman who had worked in some kind of software-related field admitting that she wasn't intrinsically excited about the work, but felt like she would be a bad feminist if she left a STEM track to do something more traditionally female-coded instead.
> one piece of evidence I find very convincing is the observation that non-human primates exhibit the same sorts of gendered behavior with toys that human children do (females wanting to treat any kind of toy as a doll, males wanting to treat any kind of toy as a tool, etc.).
This is actually why I don’t think the differences are mostly social: there’s a lot of evo-psych speculation which gets widely referenced in casual discussion but when you look at the details turns out to be much weaker. For example, that famous Hines 2002 study about vervet monkey toy preference relied on grouping toys into categories based on human leanings: a police car was masculine while a cooking pot feminine despite no vervet monkey ever associating a pot with mother’s home cooking, and the effect went away when they used other groupings (e.g. animate or inanimate objects).
What’s especially missing in these cases are controlling for social differences (e.g. any claims about women being innately worse at engineering need to center an explanation for the much lower gap in Soviet states which made an effort for gender neutrality) and attempting to explain how very complex behaviors reduce to the trait being studied. For example, a male vervet monkey preferring a police car to a cooking pot is a considerable remove from a Google software engineer or CS degree and there is usually an enormous amount of hand-waving trying to connect the two.
When I worked for a neuroscience lab years ago, this came up in conversation a bit and basically everyone thought there were innate cognitive differences but that they’d be low-level and relatively small: e.g. testosterone makes a big difference for things like grip strength and there are clearly low level anatomical differences but higher-level cognitive abilities depend on many factors and the unusual plasticity of our brains is an enormous confound. This gets harder the more advanced the skill you’re talking about: e.g. a question like whether a group of boys performed better at 3-D rotations is due to biology or because they’ve been encouraged to play with building toys and games is a already a hard research topic but looking at things like success as an engineer or scientist is orders of magnitude harder because it combines a range of different skills and the metrics are harder to quantify.
> This is actually why I don’t think the differences are mostly social: there’s a lot of evo-psych speculation which gets widely referenced in casual discussion but when you look at the details turns out to be much weaker. For example, that famous Hines 2002 study about vervet monkey toy preference relied on grouping toys into categories based on human leanings: a police car was masculine while a cooking pot feminine despite no vervet monkey ever associating a pot with mother’s home cooking, and the effect went away when they used other groupings (e.g. animate or inanimate objects).
It's certainly possible that particular study had limitations or was otherwise bad. This is a hard thing to study rigorously. My understanding wasn't that the primates were choosing toys based on gender association in (some) human societies, it's that they were playing with the same physical objects in gendered ways. And this is consistent with the anecdotal observation about human children I've heard from many parents that girls like to play with any toy as if it is a doll whereas boys like to play with any toy as if it is a tool or a gun; girls being given toy cars and then tucking them into a toy bed as if they were a doll, etc.
> What’s especially missing in these cases are controlling for social differences (e.g. any claims about women being innately worse at engineering need to center an explanation for the much lower gap in Soviet states which made an effort for gender neutrality) and attempting to explain how very complex behaviors reduce to the trait being studied. For example, a male vervet monkey preferring a police car to a cooking pot is a considerable remove from a Google software engineer or CS degree and there is usually an enormous amount of hand-waving trying to connect the two.
I don't think I would claim that women are innately worse at engineering (and I think that "engineering" is a broad enough field with enough subspecializations that it's difficult to judge engineering skill in a way that is both objective and useful). I'd claim that women are systematically less interested in the kinds of highly technical systems-focused work we associate with fields like software engineering. In other words, I think that both men and women can be taught to program a computer and do software engineering, but that men (really AMAB people, I think transwomen pattern like cis men in this respect) are much more likely to be deeply interested in programming computers and voluntarily spend a lot of time doing it to the exclusion of other things, which eventually caches out in programming as a whole being a very male-skewed field.
I think the lower gender gap in the Soviet Union and other mid-20th-century Communist states is explained by exactly what you said, explicit social and political pressure for gender equality. I also suspect that even in the Soviet system, there might have been more equal numbers of men and women doing STEM work or programming work specifically, but (at least as far as computer programming goes), males were systematically more intrinsically interested in and energized by the actual programming, whereas the women were more likely to just be doing their jobs and feeling like they would rather be spending their time doing something else. The Soviet system was in any case characterized by a large amount of state control over how people worked, in ways we generally find authoritarian today, and it's not a model I would like to see modern US employment policy follow.
> When I worked for a neuroscience lab years ago, this came up in conversation a bit and basically everyone thought there were innate cognitive differences but that they’d be low-level and relatively small: e.g. testosterone makes a big difference for things like grip strength and there are clearly low level anatomical differences but higher-level cognitive abilities depend on many factors and the unusual plasticity of our brains is an enormous confound. This gets harder the more advanced the skill you’re talking about: e.g. a question like whether a group of boys performed better at 3-D rotations is due to biology or because they’ve been encouraged to play with building toys and games is a already a hard research topic but looking at things like success as an engineer or scientist is orders of magnitude harder because it combines a range of different skills and the metrics are harder to quantify.
I agree that these are interesting and complex questions that cognitive scientists should attempt to study to the best of their ability. I don't think there's a reason to assume that boys are encouraged to play with building toys and games, rather than innately choosing to do this to the exclusion of other types of play - certainly it's as likely to be innately biological as being good at 3-D rotation itself is.
> I don't think there's a reason to assume that boys are encouraged to play with building toys and games, rather than innately choosing to do this to the exclusion of other types of play - certainly it's as likely to be innately biological as being good at 3-D rotation itself is.
Interesting take. I faced abusive repercussion in daycare for playing with the cooking set and dolls because “those aren’t my toys and it’s wrong”, so while I was inclined to think this was very much socially enforced dimorphism, your comment seems to suggest that I am in some way more “biologically feminine” than most skeptics would like to suggest. curious !
As for us being overrepresented in tech, for a lot of gals I know it’s a way for our merit to be judged over our appearance, similar to socially awkward guys preferring work that doesn’t take constant face-to-face.
As a similar example: my close Vietnamese friend met all of his best friends and girlfriend in college in VSA, a Vietnamese club. All of my non white friends went to 'Latinos in X' 'Asians in X' etc. clubs. There were no equivalents for me! I don't resent anybody for this (by dint of my personality I don't really care), and in truth it was probably good for my cold networking skills (perhaps widening the unseen advantage gap that I supposedly have even further), but I also think it's difficult to look at this and not understand why people are so discontent with DEI identity politics.