Thoughts on the issues of women in the work place

I once read about the effect of the 1970s slow wilting of the race professional career barrier. More non-white people were able to get hired within their fields of study and as a consequence, more nonwhites decided to go to college ( don't have the statistic). But there was a side effect as well.

It is to the credit of the general race and gender barrier deterioration that the quality of public school education was noticed to decline. One theory was that the highly educated nonwhites and women who could only teach in public schools were now leaving for their careers and their spaces were getting occupied by less educated people whose ambitions of money/success were bounded within reach of what salaries schools offer.

This theory related to the unfortunate fact that schools do not attract enough talented people. This is not by virtue of some natural desire for talented people to stay far away from K-12, but related to low teacher salaries. I think the lack of women or minorities for that matter in STEMs is very related to the fact that salaries are not competetive as compared with other fields. The recent passing of the Lilly Ledbetter Act may help to de-anonymize wage discrimination, but it goes to show that unequal gender/race distribution in the sciences could be societal and not "genetic". Women may be choosing their field of study based on wage potential.

What can colleges do, through marketting and/or awareness spreading? It seems difficult because it is like trying to prevent a dam from breaching with water by cleaning up the mess as opposed to not building the dam in the first place.

Can colleges help secure entry for women into STEMs careers? Yes. I have seen this with my own eyes. Unfortunately, a sort of reverse-discrimination occurs where the bar is lowered for hiring women in order to meet hiring quotas. It is one method, through college-corporate networking and feedback-policy decision-making, where more women end up in the technical work force. This is a reality. The general argument I am aware of against reverse-discrimination other than "fairness" is that subjecting companies to a potentially lower quality female work force may really hurt the case for men and women being of equal ability. That can have dangerous consequences, because employers are always conservative with respect to factors which contribute to company wealth. One of the conservative components is unfortunately a bias against women.

What then can be done instead? I don't think this is a lost cause. I think wage de-anonymization may be effective, but can also have its form of negative feedback, where employers stop hiring women so they do not have to pay them lower salaries and risk getting sued or risk paying equally. In fact I think the monetary threshold of settling on getting sued instead of paying women more has not yet been reached. No even women in management may not be able to change the situation right away, because of the pre Civil Rights Movement "uncle Tom" effect borrowed from what happens to black men and women when they do not form policy that the whites who hire them want. Their higher status may therefore
Be almost a puppet status. Booker T. Washington is a man who has been considered by W.E.B. Dubois to be such a high figure who was characterized as mainly a mouth piece for the likes of presidents (Wilson?) and other power players (Carnegie ?) .


So where is that positive note ? Maybe that can be arrived at later. I think awareness is the best tactic against discrimination we are _aware_ of.