RE: A Series on Gender and Agriculture - Issue #2
Hey @lemouth! Thanks for such a great response and parallel.
I totally understand your point. I also thinks it's important to consider the argument of affirmative action - "an action or policy favoring those who tend to suffer from discrimination, especially in relation to employment or education; positive discrimination." In this case, women have suffered from discrimination in academia due to a patriarchal society and a male-centered knowledge structure, therefore a solution to finding gender equality is such affirmative action. While it may seem imbalanced at first (the ratio of 50% over 15%), I think that the hope of this affirmative action is to target the fact that women only consist of about 15% of the applicants due to discrimination in the first place. And hopefully, through hiring more women, it will increase that pool in time to having women as 50% of the applicants.
Also you said "A dramatic result would be to miss the hiring of some excellent researchers because of gender reasons." - Yes, and also if there wasn't such affirmative action a result would be to miss the creation of some excellent female researchers in the first place because of historical discrimination in the field.
I also really appreciate your point about being careful with generalizing, and definitely agree that such a blanket statement is not applicable to all cases, such as in the U.S.! I was focusing more on developing countries in this perspective, and should have clarified that.
I would then to agree with you, except in some special case (which is actually the case I am talking about). To continue with the same example, we had last year ~200 applicants for 5 jobs. It is not the same think as having ~200 applicants for 20 jobs. For small numbers of academic jobs, one should avoid anything else than scientific excellence.
For a larger number of jobs, I still think than 50%/15% is too large. I would feel more comfortable with a softer 25%/15%. The most important point would be to identify where this 15% is coming from. To apply for a job in research, you need a PhD. There as well, 15 % of female applicants. Then one can check at the master level, again 15% (Talking about France). At the bachelor level, I don't have the numbers but I think that it is not as extreme. Much closer to the 50/50 case. The question is then: why don;t we have more female students in the master programs. And here I have no clue.
Maybe are women not that attracted by fundamental research and the amount of necessary postdocs everywhere around the world before getting a job?
To conclude, I am probably discussing a special case which is special enough for not applying general rules that would be reasonable otherwise.