Rod Liddle in The Times - women not studying Physics because they aren't very good at it?

[SeaRabbit]

In today's Times Rod 'provocative' Liddle wrote:

...my contention that the minuscule number of women studying physics at degree level is not because of conditioning or sexism, but because a much smaller proportion of women are adept at the subject, despite 30 years of expensive programmes to redress the balance. Is that misogyny on my part? What if it’s true?

I have seen some statistics that in some countries there is a far higher proportion of women in those studying STEM subjects. It was in a book I got out of the library so I can't send him the details. Has anyone got anything I can link to? I don't know what the proportion of those studying physics as opposed to STEM in general is, so if the is anything on physics in particular it would be helpful.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/stella-creasy-listen-sweetie-i-love-women-and-youve-got-it-all-wrong-about-misogyny-0tcffnc0c?shareToken=838251ba2a29b47a73917d04d99d93d0

[Copyright materiel removed by MNHQ]

About the crossings out. They are random and not inserted by me.

OP, quick heads up - we're not meant to copy the full text of articles - the Times has a paywall (but also share tokens). Maybe ask MNHQ to edit this?

Ughhhhh

It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy, very much like fellas are really crap at housework.

Low expectations, poor teaching (as a result of low expectations), pupils lose interest and they become less inclined to take the subject as an exam or career.

It really is searing, excoriating stuff. I'd be embarrassed to read it from a sixth former.

Meh he speaks nonsense. There were plenty of female Engineers in my class in college (university) way back when women believed we could have it all, do it all and they all got along just fine with Physics and the applications of it.

As far as I can see girls and women since then have typically grown up watching mothers, if they work combining the pressures of working and running a family/home with very limited support (remember the days of the housekeeper, aka facilitated men and women, common in my family as women have always worked, they are completely gone).

So quite smartly girls are more and more ensuring whatever jobs they select will fit around family life. I am a guide leader and often I hear girls comment that they’d like to be a “***” and a Mother when they grow up. That means even as early teens they are preparing themselves for the fact that they will have multiple roles in years to come. Boys are socialised quite differently to think they will be facilitated by some other woman and so can literally do anything unrestricted by the practicalities of life. If anything I think things have gotten worse in this regard for women.

In short the answer will be as always, 2 parents working shorter hours and flexibly when their children are young or in other words actual, practical equality. So when there is actually full equality and even make physists pull their parenting weight (and cut down their hours to mind their own children) then we can if realistically all careers can attract women.

I have no liking for Liddle and his irritating sexist views. But I think he has a bit of a point about the whole concept of “hate crimes”.
As Gene Hunt scornfully commented, in “Ashes to Ashes”: “Hate crimes? What, as opposed to all those ‘Love you to bits’ crimes?!”
Surely a crime is a crime. Trying to prove in court whether someone was motivated by hate is irrelevant - they should be sentenced for the actual crime committed, whether that’s physical assault or verbal abuse?
In all other respects, Lisdle’s article is simply click bait to provoke readers, and not worthy of consideration.

Make=male

I don't normally read this individual because I'm somewhat attached to what I like to think are minimum standards. But it seems abundantly clear that he's nothing more than a sad, self-entitled, egocentric little misogynist.

The physics thing, though, is just bullshit!

I have a STEM degree (engineering, not physics) and I'm literally a token woman in my job. I also line-manage a workforce of some 400 STEM professionals - almost all of them male.

The problem with women and STEM starts before we even enter a school for the first time. From the moment we're old enough to play with toys, girls are steered away from 'techy' games and towards socially geared play. Then, at school, we're assumes to be naturaally pre-inclined towards languages and social sciences. Our talents and achievements in technical subjects are all too easily overlooked. Once we get to pick our own subjects, the need to conform pushes us ever further into this corner - as does peer pressure. Who wants to be the sole girl in advanced maths when all our friends are in English Lit, after all? It's isolating!

University breaks all but the best and toughest of us. There's something almost indescribable about being one of only five women in an undergrad lecture of 300 students. When we drop out, this is as much of a factor as whether or not we're struggling academically. In fact, we don't struggle academically - we'd never have made it as far if there were the slightest doubts.

And then we go into industry, where we go on to be sexually harassed by our bosses and stared at in incredulity by our peers. Admin will develop an uncanny knack for putting us in the least technical roles available to someone with our profile. And, slowly but steadily, we'll turn into managers, administrators and book-keepers - at which point we start having kids and if everything else hasn't buried our STEM careers this one certainly will.

And then the few of us who survive somehow end up on all-female executive panels at industry events and get to publicly debate why STEM has a fucking woman problem.

In all fairness, we all know the answer: STEM has a woman problem because women and girls are systematically discouraged from making it in STEM. And - and here the viscious cycle begins - we won't resolve it until we do get more women.

Yes, this pisses me off. I'm also kind of an accidental expert.

I work in IT. For most of my working life I've been one of very few women in a very male-dominated environment. Then we started recruiting from outside Europe and, suddenly, we have a lot of female employees. I heard that in Eastern Europe, too, programming is seen as a mainly female occupation and has a correspondingly low status. So this kind of thing is cultural.

Yup, SkullPointer - fellow female STEM PhD here, and I'd fully agree with what you say.

I did my first degree at (insert name of collegiate university here) and went to a women's college. We got chatting to some of our contemporaries (all men) from the "mixed" college next door and they told us their tutor (admissions are done at a collegiate level, with the subject tutor having total control over who gets in) openly said "I will take one woman every three years or so to keep the equal ops people quiet." We did a head count. 30 out of 200 students in our subject were women - but 24 of those 30 were at women's colleges. So the "mixed" colleges were indeed taking on average one woman every three years. The maths students in our college, inspired by our investigations, did a similar calculation for their subject, and realised it was exactly the same for them. It was one of the arguments we used (successfully) to oppose our college going mixed.

I was taught by a female FRS. I used to work in the library beneath a painting of a former college fellow and female Nobel laureate. We had women who were absolutely renowned in their fields, across the board. Fast forward several decades, and the college is now mixed. All the STEM fellows are now male.

Fewer girls than boys choose to study Physics - true. But that is probably because they prefer to study other subjects - as did Liddell himself, presumably, as he prefers to be in a profession in which he can make unsubstantiated claims about random things he knows little about.
In this year’s A level results, though there were fewer girls, a higher percentage of girls’ results were graded A*. Many of these very high achieving girls may not go on to study Physics at University again because again they prefer to study other subjects (medicine, engineering, whatever).
So fuck off Rod.

Wasn't Athena Swan set up to encourage and support women in STEM(M)? Only now it's remit has been expanded to include men...

Its remit, obvs, damn phone autocorrect

NotTerfNorCis - that squares with my experience too. I remember talking to a friend who'd come to Britain to do a computing masters, having done her first degree in the West Indies. She said she'd found it really bizarre when she came here to find how male-dominated her course was, because back home it was 50-50 - it was simply seen as a really good professional qualification and route to a solid job, not a "men's field."

But WHY do they prefer to study other subjects ? Preferences don’t exist in a vacuum .

Read Skullpointerexceptions post above .

Oh and I went to a school where the girls ended up just sitting in on the physics lessons, they weren't taught as part of the class. It was all geared to the boys and the girls were very much 'othered'

I don’t know why. Social conditioning is probably a big factor, and that needs addressing, as much for the good of the subject as for women.
But when they do it, they are good at it. Liddell may as well have said “lots of people (including pretty much everyone working in the media) don’t study Physics because they are no good at it”.
So what?

What girl really wants to be considered a weirdo, laughed at and left out, for doing physics when there are things that you can do that help you fit in better? without my parents firm support I would have done English instead.

Until we rid the world of the bullying of girls who are not sufficiently feminine , the association of logical with masculinity, and the feminisation of girls from birth then we can have no idea if men are really any better at anything.

What scares me is that the feminisation and bullying is getting worse.

And I see this times article as part of that bullying process. I may be menopausally over sentive however.

It's almost amusing to see Liddle (no STEM qualifications) writing an article like this prompted by the actions of Prof Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, female winner of a Nobel prize for physics.

I suppose the fact that she was overlooked while her two male collaborators took the Nobel and all the credit - and therefore she was off the radar of people like Liddle for decades - has completely gone over his pointy little head. 🤦‍♀️

I heard that in Eastern Europe, too, programming is seen as a mainly female occupation and has a correspondingly low status. So this kind of thing is cultural.

I've worked with quite a lot of Eastern European programmers over my career and this definitely observable. What's equally observable is that - once you start running more prestigious projects and develop a reputation for running an elite squad - you'll suddenly discover that there are, after all, still a lot of male programmers over there. I literally had to fight my Eastern European counterpart recently over getting to keep the female lead developer I had on one of my projects of this nature as the local branch was ridiculously keen to give the role to a very mediocre man who was keen on visibility and career growth. Which he will get from me - if and when he catches up with her impressive skill set and overtakes her. He won't.

@Fermats, it's ridiculous, isn't it? My employer makes all executives and HR personnel attend unconscious bias training at this point in the hope of countering this phenomenon. It obviously doesn't help much - what's a one day compulsory course against a lifetime of lives experience, after all?

He’s right about hate crime. Wrong about physics, obviously, but he is very much given to humorous and, dare I say it, provocative exaggeration.

I think he's right about not being able to police the mind.
The way to change people's minds is to mix with the people you 'hate' and find they are people like you. But it isn't always the haters that make that difficult, religion etc gets in the way.

So why do all girls' schools have such great track records of girls studying STEM subjects at A level, and doing so well?

I took A-level physics teacher bullied ethnic minorities of the course, staring with girls, first then turned to the girls – me being first wasn’t allowed to change courses or school by parents so got stuck with two years of put downs – he even went so far to refuse to teach option to me and another pupil, claimed we weren’t bright enough – I had best GCSE grades of entire group - and we had to go to GCSE physics teacher who did it in her ow n time.

School was uninterested and useless. I passed but at nowhere need the grades I should have really been expected to.

DD1 been told maths isn’t for girls but a primary school teacher and first week in secondary was having to deal with boys in science group claiming she couldn’t be better than them at science as girls weren’t she must be cheating.

I ended up software engineer dealt with loads of crap there - was considered very good by people who dealt with me directly but management and training people were often utter shits. I got made redundant in first pg - and that was end of that career.

Dh works in IT - one of his colleagues was female considered brilliant - he said entire department was embarrassed in end as she kept going for promotion only for a very inferior man to get the job. She left in the end.

Hate crime is problematic though would love a shift in culture meaning my DD don’t have to deal with street harassment.