The UCSB shooter--an Aspie with a rant against women

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You are very, very wrong about that bit in bold. That's why so many women lawyers do pro bono divorce/custody work. It's why there are old-girl networks at universities that get very forceful about putting through changes that make school doable and affordable for young mothers. Why women who legislate put through so many bills to do with helping poor, disadvantaged, and otherwise helpless women. I know these women. I don't know how many rich women you know who made their own money, their own way up. I know a good many women who've fought their way up, and taken all the hits for it, and the first thing they do when they get there: they turn around and they grab younger women by the forearm and drag them the hell up. They know because they've been there.

A lot of these women forget certain things. They forget about kids, because many of them don't have kids -- the glass ceiling's particularly tough for mothers. I am personally responsible for several professional conferences' instituting childcare provisions so that mothers who have no childcare can show up. Here's how I made it happen: I yelled. And they listened, then apologized, and asked for feedback on the arrangments.

A few months ago, I sat with a woman, a retired doctor and former head of a national professional society, who had a large stack of money to give away. She knew exactly what she wanted to do with that money. She wanted it to benefit bright but otherwise ordinary young women. She'd already spent many years providing free services to poor women who were her patients, women with cancer.

Women will, in general, help women and their children. Yearly, here, there's a professional women's conference that's part networking event, part fundraiser for projects that help disadvantaged girls and women. There just aren't nearly enough women who have bucks like that doctor does. And too much of the money has to go to help women who've been beaten and otherwise abused by their boyfriends and husbands, and have managed to run away, but have to start all over. We spend a lot of money repairing damage.

You're right. It was 1946 And back when the compnany started out, they needed fluid dynamics data that didn't exist. The NACA airfoil work dealt with very low pressure, very compressible, enveloping fluids; hydraulics dealt with incompressible fluids in large gaps. What they needed to know about was the behavior of 200 psi air flowing through channels and around right-angles between surfaces a ten-thousandth of an inch apart. No luck, so they did the research themselves.

We actually funded two university laboratories. We also ran a paid internship program in cooperation with them, and even set the grad-students up with apartments when they came for the summer. I trained some of them. That collaboration helped us do better work in optics, microlithography, thin-film coatings, and (since you mentioned it) healthcare. But that work wasn't tax-funded. In addition to that, they had a very hard time getting their work peer-reviewed, published, or cited because not many people know anything about that type of work.



Actually, the most accurate instrument that we had up until the '80s or '90s was called a microcator (or mikrokator). It was invented by a Swede named Carl E. Johansson. Look him up. I'm not sure when he invented it, but his first patent was awarded in 1901, and he died in 1943. They were only certified to a millionth of an inch, but you could actually use them down to about 13 nanometers.



I need to take a step back here. These words stood out: "bending my life around it and damaging my health to do it well, and I'll get f**k-all for thanks." I've said that it's not OK when that happens in fields that I've worked in, and I would be the world's biggest hypocrite if I said anything different here. This has my attention now. It's time for me to listen.



I have done just that, actually. Give me a whiteboard (or just a pen and some napkins) and I'll put on a colloquium at the drop of a hat. I've done pro bono technical training for people that I've met who were motivated but couldn't afford to go back to school. When I'm out biking and stop to help someone fix a flat tire, I show them all of the tricks to make it easy. People sometimes grossly overestimate how experienced I am at it.

It's not fair to say that I don't work for my community. One of the reasons that my city isn't flat out broke is that we had a responsible Democratic mayor. I helped put him in office. He had to make some cuts when the state slashed local government aid, but he also raised taxes. The city took a middle course that didn't make anyone happy, but didn't single anyone out for hardship either. And we kept things like the summer jobs program that we had for poor kids: http://www.minneapolismn.gov/cped/metp/cped_stepup

When I had a stable job, the engineer women at my workplace (yes most were men) made about twice what I made even though I worked longer hours, that's a matter of supply and demand, engineers are more rare and yet very demanded and necessary, hence the high wage. I am not denying the gender pay gap for the same work/industry or that it shouldn't be fixed, but when you compare your pay to another industry, the gender gap becomes minimal in the equation, the industry gap is much much larger, their starting salaries as fresh graduate were about equal to my 4th year salary.
The reason why careers in support/business/services/social/banking make less money than careers in engineering/cs/science/medicine is because the latter disciplines have fewer graduates yet increasing demand, hence more value in the market, and all corporates are going more IT.

It is true that this could be done more intelligently, focusing on complex community problems and personal needs.. But I am not sure that life works that way, because frankly, you cannot reason with (men) in those terms, it's all about the law and cold facts.. For instance, if you see people fighting for global warming and environmental issues, people will be so against it that only cold facts can do anything about it. To change social norms, unfortunately, the fight probably always turns into hostile opposition and only through uprising and demand you can hope to achieve anything. This sort of active fight is aimed only at those who oppose blindly and don't go into discussions (and most people are like that actually..), and also arises from endless frustration. For instance in WP. Discussing with people day in day out you start to see that they are not really willing or caring, they have their comfortable notions and that's all. That causes such a great frustration. People are all about power..

Also both are bad, and those who are doing the comparing are even worse. Although frankly, I think that this shaming is not that bad, because I dont understand why would you want to have a child if you cannot guarantee her/him a good life. Also most single mums work, and even worse, have double glass ceiling.

Income inequality between poor and rich is of course another topic, and I fully agree that it is more important than some of the feministic issues. Having so many people on the poverty line is unacceptable, and we should be discussing about that above all. But even then, in lower paid jobs, females are sexually harassed more, and also tend to be promoted less. We should simply just be talking about it so that these notions of lesser sex would be eradicated from collective society subconsciousness.

WI think what people really want to know is did the engineer women make as much as the engineer men?

They didn't, reason was because they didn't go to field (we are talking about electrical/civil eng) and were just in the presales/back office team (design, drawing maps/plans...etc), when one was promoted to do field work as head of the project, she left it to go back to office work because she faced opposition from the field workers/builders (who are often poorly educated and very old fashioned) who weren't "comfortable" in taking orders from her, so yea here you go, sexism got her discouraged to go on, she was like "not worth the trouble".

I was just telling Tarantella why the support jobs have low pay.

I wouldnt be surprised if they did. Because its harder for a woman to become an engineer statistically they should be more qualified/better than an average male engineer, or know how to make a better career and so earn a bit more on average.

Hey, you're back. I haven't seen you post here in quite a while.

This is very cool. And I'm not surprised they had trouble publishing etc. -- the clubs are tight and agoraphobic. I'm going to point something out, though, about those labs you funded. Unless these labs live in research universities that are privately funded -- and there's not much of that going on -- the labs and the faculty existed for you to go to because of Vannevar Bush. As you likely know, universities take about half off the top of all external funding and use it for overhead, which includes salary lines and lab setups for research faculty who haven't made their bones yet. It's not unusual for the investment per to run a couple-few million. The lab exists in a building which has operating expenses, and a small army of administrators. You guys paid for a few years of PI salary (part or whole), maybe some grad student stipends, maybe some supplies/instrumentation. But a lot had to exist before those things could go to work, and you didn't pay for them.

Dare I say, you may even have been relying on public-school educations, somewhere in there. God only knows where grad students come from.



And this is the only instrument you used in your research, total? You used a big box of mikrokators for all lab work?



It's a thing. There's a fair amount of pop hyperbole surrounding work on this stuff, but if unpaid caregiving labor suddenly stopped, economies would have a hell of a time. Mothers (and, increasingly, fathers) do a fair bit of that labor, but so do others: people taking care of elderly parents and disabled adult children and siblings (still primarily women doing all that work), people taking care of their working neighbors' children after school because they're afraid of what will happen to an unattended 6-year-old in the two hours before an adult gets home (also primarily women)...it's a lot of work. Social expectations come into it: when women pass on unpaid caregiving work, or even complain about not being paid, the reaction's not good, and it matters. I think that in child custody, there's better acceptance now of shared care, but over time the care of children tends to drift back to the mother, who essentially subsidizes the father's ability to go and work, but sees little benefit from it - while also being pushed away from well-paid jobs that require, say, travel or the ability to work odd hours away from home. Women also come in for a lot of social pressure to avoid going back to work soon after having children -- it's true that babies cared for at home tend to be healthier, but it's women, not men, who are expected to do the staying home, and to damage their paid careers if necessary. (At this point some of the pressure's coming from governments: there's a big public-health push to breastfeed, which is great in some respects because sure, breastmilk seems to be great stuff correlated with healthier kids, and yes, it does save money when women aren't buying formula with WIC cards. But the women who get scolded about formula 4 hours after giving birth don't see a cut of the savings, even though they're the ones putting in the time to sit there and do it (and it's not always a painless delight), and they run into serious pushback at work about doing it. Nursing rooms, still not a thing. Time to nurse or pump mid-afternoon, guess again. And yes, the copay for the electric pump is all yours, assuming insurance covers it in the first place; you also get to wash out the bazillion bottles and deal with milk storage.)

Guy I'm working with on one grant, his wife's a PhD biochemist, but she's the one home with all the kids. She'll have one hell of a time ever getting back into science. Not because she's suddenly stupid, or incapable of catching up/de-rusting, but because of social attitudes in science about what it means to have children and to leave to care for them. So not only is she taking the immediate hit, doing free childrearing, but she'll likely pay for the rest of her life, and it'll be a substantial price. In money alone.

The idea is that you're supposed to get paid for caregiving in love and satisfaction, or just not think of it in terms of compensation at all -- it's a wholly sentimental (and highly convenient) view. My daughter is a near-daily delight and I'm deeply grateful to be her mom, but love don't pay the bills. Bringing her up is good work in the best sense, but work nonetheless, and it comes with opportunity costs (including sleep. More sleep would be a beautiful thing). In the midst of this, I'm supposed to find and pay for health insurance, pay non-covered healthcare costs (another $250 on glasses today, yiii, kid's eyes are changing every time she blinks), and take care of my own retirement. If K12 weren't publicly funded, we'd be sitting here choosing between math and food, because I don't have time to do free childrearing work, paid work, and free homeschooling. (I did try.) And it's tough to deny that a well-educated, well-mannered, responsible, sane, enterprising young adult is a social good, a resource. The point is they don't get that way all by themselves. No doubt if I had the experience, I'd have similar jeremiads on the invisible and unpaid caregivers who walk their parents nicely to death, and the siblings whose lives are devoted to keeping the disabled or mentally ill sib alive and out of prison.

Some of the best analysis of the free-caregiving-labor issues I've seen comes from law: Joan Williams, I think at Georgetown, writes extensively about it. Her notion of the ideal worker is, I think, a strong one. I'm not a fan of everything I've read of hers, but it's her advocacy that's been responsible for some changes in child-support determinations (collections are something else entirely). There are some people at MIT who investigate work cultures and the devaluation -- social and financial -- of support roles which are in fact crucial to operations, and not coincidentally are held mostly by women. There's also an economist I'm not too keen on named Nancy Folbre, at Amherst; she's pink and sentimental for my technocratically-trained tastes, but I'll go with some of her arguments. I'd guess there are more; I stopped reading in the area several years ago. I don't know, but I'd guess that it's an area of research in 3rd-world industrialization and issues surrounding educating girls. Because that's a big part of the fear: you educate the girls, you risk losing a lot of free and subservient labor. Notwithstanding the fact that Hillary's IR writing is weak as hell, this is why she's so relentless on the education of girls internationally. It's much harder to enslave a woman who's employable at a wage, even if it's a terrible wage.

The rebuttal, when anyone bothers to make one, is generally that caregiving is a choice, it's volunteer work. Or you get moral arguments that go "la la la" if you mention money and the fact that nobody can live on air, that screwy helio-diet woman notwithstanding. I notice the same people who make the choice argument also tend to wig when women decline to have children or take care of elderly parents, or send children to preschool, or fiddle while the birthrate falls below replacement, etc.



All great stuff, and again, respect. So what exactly is your beef with being told to pony up for healthcare and ed?

oh: should say, a lot of the academic writing to do with free caregiving labor comes from marxists, with all the attendant problems, incl. unreadability. Not too many others are interested, from what I can make out. But there's a study going on that should be interesting, and of which I'm a part; labor sociologist, I think, studying a group of women who were undergraduate attendees at the first of a set of national conferences for women college leaders, about 20 years ago. I believe we all had to be nominated to attend, not sure, was just a kid. My guess, given her publications, is that she's looking to do some assessment of where we've come out v. what might have been expected, given the level of promise. Because if we're not doing as well as men from the same cohort, it's very hard to say that well, this is a case of lack of ability or ambition or education or what have you. It's actually a good time-marker to pick, if that's what she's after; it had just stopped being unusual for women to go to college in the expectation of more than an MRS. But I don't know. I'll be interested to see what she comes up with.

http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt260238.html

Hey can you all come over here and help me through this please?

What you are describing are somewhat on the civic service end (at least ideally), albeit higher powered and higher paying. They may be jobs that were traditionally held by men only, but they still aren't the ones with the real power. It's the corporate world that holds the vast majority of the wealth and power. There are some who do good in the world, but the vast majority don't care about the disadvantaged or the genuinely suffering right in their own back yard, the so-called "developed" world.


Good for you (sincerely, no sarcasm). But our society also needs to stop stigmatizing men for choosing to work less so they can be better fathers. Both parents working 60 hours a week and shuffling the children off to retired relatives and paid sitters doesn't make for happy children. I can picture a Brave New World style dystopia where parents ship their children off 24/7 and basically never have to see them. Both parents have to push themselves to an equally high powered career so one partner doesn't ever feel inadequate compared to the other.


Again, a doctor, not a narcissistic corporate goon. Yes, there are good doctors who aren't just in it for the money. I have yet to see an investment banker who isn't in it mainly for the money.


I can't criticize progressive "on the ground" tactics. I know things don't change by standing around singing kumbaya. The problem I see with the left is the PR. You're an extremely intelligent person but the vast majority of people are knuckleheads who hear soundbites. They hear people on the left screaming "unfair", but they aren't willing to take a nuanced look or see what the reality is for people who aren't exactly like them. Hearing that the world is unfair doesn't really stir much feeling in them, so they don't really investigate the nitty gritty or try to empathize with situations they never experienced. They just fall back on comfortable "but anyone can make it" just-world-fallacy BS. "unfair" isn't enough to rile their concern. I think maybe putting more emphasis on the fact that people are actually suffering will make more people wake the f**k up. What about women who suffer the psychological consequences of abuse, but can't even get the mental health help they need and end up committing suicide? Politicians don't even talk about that kind of s**t!! ! They don't talk about the people quite literally dying on the street. People who can't work and can't get preventive care.

So yes, it takes money to solve problems because our society is based on money. I just think the "take home" message to the masses should be community and caring for the vulnerable, not unfairness. The Ayn-Rand worshiping wank-jobs won't respond to anything, but average people, even those who lean conservative, are receptive to a message that we need to have community and take care of each other. They aren't receptive to the normal rhetoric of the left, definitely not the message feminists are conveying.

It's quite entertaining to hear what society says on free care giving. On the one hand, it's a "choice". On the other, you are socially pressured until you "make" the choice to do it. Is it really a choice if society treats you with resentment when you make it?

I have this issue and I'm not even a mother of a human child. I have a dog. Both my husband and I agreed to get our dog. Yet, when it comes to taking care of him, I do all of the work. I'm also EXPECTED to do it all in regards to chores, cooking, and other things. I had to explain to my husband that he is unconsciously having sexist expectations even though that isn't his intention. It took a while for him to realize he did internalize all of these expectations and pushed them onto me. Also, the people he hangs around subtly reinforce these expectations they have about women, so it took active dissecting of his thoughts to realize what is going on.

I bet if you asked people around you if they think free care giving is a choice, they would say yes EVEN IF they reinforce the idea of it with their words. Specific ideas are SO common that people don't give second thoughts to their word usage and the meaning behind it.

You know what's weird about this whole shooter ordeal? People didn't even take his threats seriously. I have read that his parent(s) tried to take his manifesto (I think) to the police and they ignored it. His beliefs are so common that if he DIDN'T kill people, they would still be accepted. Granted, his wording is a little more direct than others, so it might have lead to more outrage. Yet, these attitudes are so common that no one really takes it seriously until something bad happens. After all, it's just a man being a man, right?

That's pretty close to what I grew up with, except that my dad was very involved at home. He was the cook of the family*, did most of the household paperwork, and was also more reliable about chores.

The problem was that he had the better job, so he usually worked more hours than my mom did. Between that and household upkeep, I never got to know him very well.

My mother wanted to keep her job so that she would have more leverage in the relationship. I'm sympathetic, but I'm also sympathetic to husbands wanting to keep romantic options on the table. It seemed unfair that she expected to have 'other options' and to not depend on my dad to meet her daily desires, but at the same time expected him to throw himself to her mercy in matters of affection, caretaking and sex.

And regarding their unequal career success: She's wicked smart in a left-brained (serial, load-store) way, but not nearly as good at solving messy problems. He's almost as fast as she is on serial tasks, and he's uncommonly proficient at cutting through entangled variables. That made him a much better doctor than she is.

(*We would wake up to fresh scones, home-made biscotti and espresso, lunch on a baguette dipped in gruyere and emmentaler fondue, and sup on coc au vin - all made by my dad.)

If that's what your mom told you, NK, so it goes, but I couldn't recommend any woman giving up her career after marriage. Not safe for her or the kids.

I know a doc who stayed home after having her three. Know her pretty well. The guy turned out to be not so marvelous, sleeps with everything with a pulse, full of excuses about why he's not coming home. Who knows what else he lies about She's pretty well trapped. Nobody around here needs a rusty doc, he's still paying her loans, keeps her on a short leash otherwise, and she's not trained for any other work that'd do much more than cover childcare.

Other fora are full of crying, terrified ladies who went into marriage all Disney-eyed and stopped working, have kids. Guy turned out to be a horror and not only went and found fresh companionship but dumped their asses cold. So now what? No job, big resume gap, kids. Not so dandy for the kids, poverty and life with a freaked-out mom who has no useful resume. Especially if the guy's vindictive and lawyers up effectively. Legal Aid, not quite the same thing.

Got another friend who left her PhD on the shelf, went off to be a housewife, has four kids. Her guy seems to be a decent fellow, but it's funny what having all the money does. Before he retired, he had a job he could put down when he pleased after certain hours, while she worked all the damn time taking care of four little kids, and him, and a house. He'd go off for his well-earned rest and never have it cross his mind that she'd earned one, too. Wasn't happy to have it brought to his attention, either. After all, he had a real job.

I was careful to keep property and skills up, too, going into marriage. After all, what if things went poorly? Very good thing I did; my kid's life would've been very different otherwise. Not good different.

Perhaps the leverage your mom was talking about was simply insurance against things like this. Dunno. I don't see how this equates to "fine, then the guy's entitled to an open marriage." He has a job, she has a job, they both do home-type work, this is a rough equality. If you're then going to talk about open marriages, then that equality would suggest that it's open for both -- assuming they agree this is how they want the marriage to be.

I'm still married, but I don't want to be. One of the big fears I have is that my husband will not do any childcare. He's already told me that if we separate he doesn't see why he should have to do any school pickups. I cant tell if this is an idle threat or if he really means it. I think he means it.

I need to be able to travel, attend evening things, etc. etc.

I already do the majority of pickups and drop-offs, even though he has a much more flexible schedule than I do. He can't drive and won't take the bus.