Actual post from Dec. 15 from one of the streams. This is a real topic. As far as promoting women and minorities even if their qualifications are not as good as the white male scientists, I am all for it. We need diversity at the lab and if that is what it takes, so be it. Quit your whining. Look around the lab, what do you see? White male geezers. How many African Americans do you see at the lab? Virtually none. LLNL is one of the MOST undiverse places you will see. Face it folks, LLNL is an institution of white male privilege and they don't want to give up their privileged positions. California, a state of majority Hispanics has the "crown jewel" LLNL nestled in the middle of it with very FEW Hispanics at all!
Comments
11/21/2019 8:08 PM"
Good point however why would women want men in their bathroom.
How do you define merit? Do you want a bunch of wanna be professors at NNSA labs that want do research? I think not. There is no way to judge merit, expertise or experience. They have no meaning and if you say they do than are not relevant.
Ok joking aside, how does merit mean anything at the current labs? At LANL it is non stop hiring and merit has nothing to do with it.
Yeah, point taken. I just thought "confusing" him was better than screaming at him, which is what I felt like.
The idea of communism is liberating it creates collective spirit to build a better world. Well at least that is what young people are saying. Communism is making a big comeback with our younger folks, so maybe the "fifth" experiment will work.
Your contribution is the most intelligent and relevant I have seen in a while!
I agree with what you are saying, however what motivation does LANL have in hiring the best and brightest and what possible metric could be used? The metrics used in academics and industry are simply not used at LANL. We cannot hire excellence in academics because these are wanna be professors who will want to dedicate some portion of their time to academic or cutting edge research and LANL is simply no longer interested in this and sees no value in it. They cannot hire people who could be excellence in industry because the people want to make products and and have an impact. LANL has no interests in work for others, and think any sort tech it needs can simply be done elsewhere. So what we have left is that LANL simply hires willy-nilly and whatever which leads to the bizarre random distribution of skill sets that lab has which range from outstanding to absolutely bottom of the barrel. As long as money is coming and people are hired to dissipate the money than everything is fine. LANL has been a decline for some time it is now known in the outside that this not a place to go if you are a top talent.
The bigger point is that no one is going to say to some women that they where hired just for diversity or nepotism because they cannot point to why or how ANYONE is actually hired at the labs. It is just random. Money opens up and you hire warm bodies, that is how it works. The only qualification to get hired is if there is money. Groups can go through long time searches and interview people and choose the 2 best people out of 10 people. Other groups just hire the four random people who happen to there at the time. The group that hires the 4 random people will always ALWAYS be seen as more successful than the group that hired to 2 top people.
BTW if you do manage to hire qualified women they will probably be smarter than you. Yes they can be hard to find because they had to be really smart to get through all the gender bias in grad school and many better places want to hire them.
If someone is "hard to find" it is because they have not made any impression or reputation based on merit.
12/05/2019 6:25 PM
Yes the argument is bit off. It something is hard to find you will probably not have much of it.
Just saying.
By the way is any evidence for gender bias in graduate school? Just saying there are more men in certain STEM fields than women is not evidence since there could be many other reasons.
12/07/2019 8:23 AM
Way to try to recover after playing the "women are victims" card.
Do you have any evidence for your assertions? It just sounds like bunch on random and rather confused claims lacking any merit or data whatsoever.
"It makes me sad that so many smart people never get a chance in school etc. because they are poor or the wrong type etc. "
What is the wrong type? Even kids that grow up poor can do well in school and yes many can go on to be very successful. Is there any actually evidence that there are all these people that "never get a chance in school".
"But mostly women are turned off/away as undergraduates or earlier—mysteriously lower grades for the same answer on a test, hostility if they ask a question, surprise from faculty if they excel, actual lowering of grades to get them to quit..."
This sounds like pure BS. Especially in science or math where grading is based much more on objective measures. Where do you come with this stuff.
The rest of the post makes little sense and is utterly convoluted.
I was at an HBC because at a previous university a professor came to me and warned me that the physics faculty spoke openly of their determination to never graduate a woman. He told me that I needed to leave before they forced a woman as talented as me out of the field. Are you saying that when my white male friend gave the same answer on a test that I did and got full credit and I got zero points, that was fair? Do you think MAYBE that might be discouraging? This happened again and again and my female friends just quit when it happened to them. I transferred as the honest professor had advised. I went from the HBC to what is arguably the world’s best grad school and my career has been enormously successful, but it was hard to have to transfer as an undergrad because the science faculty were dinosaurs (all but one).
There aren’t many women and minorities in science. That is a fact and means it is hard to find qualified women and minorities to apply for jobs. From your position of white male privilege are these facts something that makes no sense to you? Is what I saw as a woman in physics happening around me BS or are you just too privileged to have any idea what might have happened to other students or didn’t you actually go to college? Even a multiple choice test can be graded unfairly. Are you JUST a women-hating troll or really that ignorant?
I think you are troll and just making this up to make minority and women scientists look bad. You are fake, try again.
Your personal experience governs your entire understanding (misunderstanding) of the issue. That isn't very scientific of you.
Is this real? I suspect that you may not be who you claim. A couple of points.
" Are you saying a poor black kid who did not get any education in high school has the same chance in college as a rich, privileged white person who got an excellent education and any help they needed? Are you saying that none of these poor kids could possibly be as smart as a rich white person? "
This is the problem with the concept of "white privilege" What about the poor white, and asians kids that also went to inner city school. Why exclude them? Also if you familiar with graduate school and use the privilege card based on family income or eduction you would have noticed plenty of minorities who came from families of professors, wealthy business people ect. I have no problem with your point that if you are poor and go schools that are lacking than yes these people will have some disadvantages however this is really based on class not race. As bizarre as it seems the one thing SJW types and academics will never touch is class, because one you do it really destroys the race narrative. I can understand class privilege but "white" privilege is as they say a bit problematic. Does one have Asian privilege, coastal privilege, NYC privilege, Jewish privilege. How about Hispanics, what about Syrains, what about people with mental illness and so on.
"university a professor came to me and warned me that the physics faculty spoke openly of their determination to never graduate a woman."
This sounds fake to me. This would mean that there is some university is out there that has never graduated a women in physics?
"Are you saying that when my white male friend gave the same answer on a test that I did and got full credit and I got zero points, that was fair? Do you think MAYBE that might be discouraging? This happened again and again and my female friends just quit when it happened to them."
Again this sounds fake. Either you have not remwebvered things correctly or are being dishonest. I have never heard of anything like this nor know anyone who has.
"Is what I saw as a woman in physics happening around me BS or are you just too privileged to have any idea what might have happened to other students"
My first guess is BS, but is possible that you remember things a "bit" different from how it actually was. I am not sure what you mean by "my privilege". I simply do not understand these "privilege" arguments. From what I can tell they are code words that is justification for bigotry, so it is rather ugly. In another time words like privilege would have been replaced with Jewish.
There was a time when line managers had Equal Opportunity/ Affirmative Action thoroughly integrated into their daily decisions.
12/05/2019 2:56 PM
Rephrased: "There was a time when line managers had Equal Opportunity/ Affirmative Action thoroughly pounded into their thick WASP skulls."
A few learned.
Good dissection of 12/09/2019 10:41 AM's post. It smelled fishy to me too.