Give the men more points
Ah, so that’s how it’s done.
A Japanese medical school deliberately cut women’s entrance test scores for at least a decade, an investigation panel said on Tuesday, calling it a “very serious” instance of discrimination, but school officials denied having known of the manipulations.
…
The alterations were uncovered in an internal investigation of a graft accusation this spring regarding the entrance exam for Tokyo Medical University, sparking protests and anger.
Lawyers investigating bribery accusations in the admission of the son of a senior education ministry official said they concluded that his score, and those of several other men, were boosted “unfairly” – by as much as 49 points, in one case.
When it becomes unfashionable to tell women to go away, one has to resort to secret manipulations.
They also concluded that scores were manipulated to give men more points than women and thus hold down the number of women admitted, since school officials felt they were more likely to quit the profession after having children, or for other reasons.
“This incident is really regrettable – by deceptive recruitment procedures, they sought to delude the test takers, their families, school officials and society as a whole,” lawyer Kenji Nakai told a news conference.
This kind of thing is one hint as to how James Damore’s “manifesto” was so wrong: we can’t assume women “just don’t like tech as much as men do” when there are still so many obstacles being thrown under their wheels all the time.
The investigation showed that the scores of men, including those reappearing after failing once or twice, were raised, while those of all women, and men who had failed the test at least three times, were not.
Inflate the men’s scores but leave the women’s alone – that’s a level playing field, right? After all they didn’t lower the women’s scores.
Yep. And even when it’s not overt, the systemic prejudice is still there. I am reminded of the IT consultant named “Kim” who couldn’t get a job or even an interview until he changed his resume to read “MR Kim”. (Apologies for the Huffingtonpost link, but it just echoes others.)
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/15/kim-ogrady-discovered-gender-discrimination_n_3599828.html
Or for the reason that, once they get there, they are treated like they are second class? Disrespected? Asked to make coffee or water plants? Or, like I have experienced repeatedly, told “you’re just not qualified” to be on a search committee for someone doing the same job I am doing, teaching the same classes?
What’s the old saying? A woman has to work twice as hard to be considered half as good?
Ah, here it is.
” “Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.””
Charlotte Whitton (thank you Google?Wiipedia)
I’d missed the second part. I guess Charlotte Whitton never had to go to medical school in Japan…
YNNB – there’s also the old saying “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels.”
In my experience, there are some skills that women have that give them the ability to do some jobs better in general than do men. And they are by no means confined to traditional domestic arts. At the huge 2,000 ft deep open-pit gold mine at Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, the dump trucks are each as big as a house, and each carry a payload of 225 tonnes of ore. The mine management insists that they be driven exclusively by women, and they descend 2,000 ft down a one-way road to the bottom of the pit, get loaded, and climb out on a different road. At a maximum speed of 4 km per hour.
It was found that men were unsuitable for the job, as they tended to get competitive in an alpha-male manner, and drove too dangerously. I do not know if any of them managed to leave the road and take the most direct route to the bottom, but there would not have been much left of the truck if one did.
In Stalinist Russia, for whatever reason, most of the doctors were women (~80%?).
In industry during WW2, when micro-measuring equipment was scarce, it was found that women had more sensitivity to the diameters of machined cylindrical parts, and with practice could guage them by feel, without need for Verniers or micrometers.
Omar @ 5:
Still today in Russia more women are doctors than men. However, this does not have anything to do with skill, per se; it has more to do with the fact the medicine in general in Russia is not considered to be a very respectable profession, so mostly women enter it given that their entry into “respectable” careers is limited by systemic sexism, just as it is in the USA. This is a well known phenomenon: jobs losing cultural respectability as women make inroads into them. The job of “book keeper”, for example, used to be very prestigious a few hundred years ago, before the advent of computers, and it was dominated by men, but now most accountants or secretaries are considered to be somewhat lower functionaries and those jobs are often held by women. Today, software engineering (and engineering more generally) is considered prestigious and… it is dominated by men. Not, of course, because men are better at it, by any stretch of the imagination.
I do know of one field of endeavor where there is a clear distinction in average skill, and in peak skill at the highest levels of achievement: technical rock climbing. In that sport, women excel in general and become far better than men. The explanation (in general) is that because rock climbing requires careful technique that must be learned and honed over time, rather than brute strength, women learn to start working on their technique from day one. Men, on the other hand, having a strength advantage (on average), will tend to rely on that strength to overcome technical obstacles rather than learning the necessary technique from day one. Amusing side story: there is at least one famous climber who was accused of cheating after she made the first free ascent of a world-class route that had been attempted by many men, because her hands were smaller than theirs and she was able to finger-jam some cracks that they could not.
“…there is at least one famous climber who was accused of cheating after she made the first free ascent of a world-class route …”
Did they think she used a jet-pack or something?/snark
I’m guessing there are rules and regulations for rock climbing as a sport and what tools, equipment and gear are allowed or not and what might constitute “cheating.” I just liked the idea of someone being sneaky with a jet-pack…
Haha! That would be pretty clearly cheating, although I though that we were all supposed to be issued jet packs back at the turn of the century.
As regards the “cheating”, in free climbing it’s considered cheating and not a true free ascent if you place a piece of protection and then use that to gain height. That’s considered “aid climbing”, not free climbing, which involves using only your body and your skill to ascend. All of the men who had attempted the route had to aid-climb the crack in question, since their fingers were too big; they accused the woman who had climbed the route free of doing the same thing, but she was able to demonstrate that her fingers were small enough to jam the cracks that they couldn’t. At any rate, it caused quite a stir that the size of her fingers was considered a “cheat”.
Just a quick clarification to what James Garnett #8 said – “free climbing” and a “free ascent” does not refer to climbing without any equipment, like a harness and ropes and other protective gear to attach the ropes to. It just means that the equipment is not used to help you ascend, it’s only there to stop you killing yourself when you fall. Climbing without any special equipment at all (except shoes and chalk) is specifically “free soloing”.
Karellen @ #9 is exactly right. Lynn Hill did the first free climb of El Capitan, but it was not without protective gear. She just didn’t use gear to ascend. (Thanks, Karellen.)
Not to derail this thread, of course. The point is that Lynn did it when no man could. (Or at least had.)
Susan Jacoby has written about similar manipulations to exclude Jews from Ivy League schools for most of the the 20th century.
James @6 – another example is teaching. Teaching used to be a profession dominated by men, and highly respected. As more and more women entered teaching, it became “if you can’t do, teach” or other snarky stupid sayings like that, and it became a more poorly paid profession. (Nannies and governesses had, of course, always taught, and those were never particularly respected professions. A working woman might become a governess to avoid having to be a maid, a barmaid, or a prostitute…it was one of the few things open to her that had even marginal respectability).
Some jobs, such as physical therapy, are dominated by women, but the supervisory and administrative roles are dominated by men, who get into the field and get promoted very quickly. Same with librarians…mostly women, but a large percentage of the management is promoted from the male librarians.
iknklast:
I found that the saying apparently originated with this cartoon here.