Wednesday, June 9, 2010

The Patriarchy

A small part of a paper by Larissa Remennick of Bar-Ilan University about Russian engineers in Israel:
Besides the general problems of language command and skill incompatibility common for all immigrant engineers, women faced an additional disadvantage due to the local definition of engineering as a male occupation. Many participants related that they were screened out at the stage of sending a resume´ and never arrived at job interviews, although potential employers never openly mentioned their gender as a reason. Several women who had job interviews along with male candidates they knew (both immigrant and local-trained) pointed out that employers eventually hired men whose prior work experience was poorer than theirs, invariably preferring a male and (if available) local candidate to a female and immigrant one. ‘Israelis don’t believe that women can be ambitious and competent engineers’, was a recurrent statement during group discussions. One woman, who was hired and soon fired when a male candidate applied for her job, tried to sue the firm for gender discrimination. Her Israeli friends dissuaded her from doing that, saying she would deprive herself of any further chance of a decent job. ‘It’s a small market-place, and a woman can’t afford to have the reputation of a troublemaker’, the advice went.
The article's about Israel, but the North American readers of this silly website have likely seen similar things in their localities. A lot of countries produce - or have in the past produced - female graduates in science and technology on a level unheard of in my environs. I wonder how Russia is doing now in this area.

11 comments:

mikey said...

All I can tell you is back during the Great Fat Tranny Wars a few years back, Pinko Punko sent me to engage in peace talks with Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy whereupon the entire skirmish exploded into a nuclear exchange. Anger and bad feelings still surround my memories of the whole thing. Still love and admire Pinko, but I chafe at the peace.

Personally, I blame I Blame the Patriarchy.

'S'all I got. Please carry on...

Captcha apparently doesn't see the value in breasts, considers itself to be the antiple...

Substance McGravitas said...

All I'm sayin' is that it's fine for me to make fun of Miss Novosibirsk State University of Economics and Management 2009 but she might have a better chance at doing something science or technology related somewhere other than here.

Mind you I live upstairs from a hot neurobiologist, so maybe I'm completely bonkers.

N__B said...

(A) Mrs. __B is from Novosibirsk. You got a problem with that?

(B) The old Soviet system turned out a lot of good engineers and scientists, a larger percentage of whom were women than was true in the US at that time. I don't know how it now goes in Russia, but the percentage of women continues to creep up* in U.S. technical and science fields.

*Except in my office where the women outnumber the men.

Substance McGravitas said...

(A) Mrs. __B is from Novosibirsk. You got a problem with that?

Maybe.

Smut Clyde said...

The impression I gained from Russian colleagues is that Russia is not really employing scientists any more, male or female; and not really paying those whom it does employ, so that they need day jobs as taxi-drivers and the like to pay the bills.

Substance McGravitas said...

During Soviet times when they were producing scientists and engineers, they'd often hire for other jobs anyway. In the paywall-hidden paper above, real practice in their field is shown to be lacking when they show up in Israel.

fish said...

Miss Novosibirsk State University of Economics and Management 2009

After reviewing her qualifications, I am willing to give her a job.

As I said over at the place ZRM never hangs out at anymore, in biomedical sciences, the starting is 50/50 if not a little more towards women. The problems seem to start when the women want to have kids. Systemic structural blockades still force women more than men to take a career trajectory hit when they start a family.

N__B said...

In the paywall-hidden paper above, real practice in their field is shown to be lacking when they show up in Israel.

Sure, I encountered some Soviet-era "engineers" who were actually draftsmen, but most I met were good...especially at making something work with few resources.

Substance McGravitas said...

My anecdotal evidence suggests similar talent, but I'm not writing a paper about it. For what it's worth there are science fields that really sucked there: I've read a paper all about how there was no credible epidemiology in the USSR - though there were many people teaching and studying it - because the knowledge, resources and methods were so restricted.

N__B said...

I think there may have been fewer problems with engineering than science. Lack of money and an excess of politics tens to screw with experiments more so than design...as the W administration recently demonstrated for us.

Substance McGravitas said...

There's another reason the Israeli paper might show results different from our experiences: we take an immigrant elite, whereas Israel takes all comers of a certain persuasion.