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I think people will always be scared of losing their job or their way of life changing.. so coming up with reasons why somebody who is different from you is somehow not as good at what you do, is a comforting path to go down for many people. It will be a battle between people that don't want things to change and the people who want to see things change. I do think that when anybody says "hey ya know you should just be happy about more women or minorities or whatever being helped to get into your field, or "you can't complain you've had a bunch of advantages to get where you are.." I do think that causes a bunch of push-back from people who do have a reasonable basis to say that whatever advantage they may have had may also have been tiny or in their case non-existent or whatever. So I do hope the narrative does eventually shift toward something more constructive like saying lets support women and minorities getting into the STEM area, but should also help to remove from the discourse statements that undermine the hard work that the men did to get into these challenging fields. If somebody makes a statement like "and you look at this math department and they are all men.. clearly something is going on.." that is implying that those men don't deserve to be there, which obviously creates a very negative situation for everybody involved both the men and the women seeking to be in those fields that historically have large percentages of men.


Not sure what all of this has to do with the linked article, which discusses purely the scientific merit of claims of bias in STEM.




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