leroyjenkens said:
Why?
I realize the accepted norm is that a statement like that doesn't require elaboration, but in this case I think it needs some.
North America is a heterogeneous, multicultural society. The past century has witnessed numerous groups fight for equality, and although the fight is not yet entirely over, we, as a society, have overall decided that equality and fairness are core values that we should embrace. However, this is a relatively new attitude, and several institutions have been around for much longer, to the extent that they are still populated by members of the privileged ethnicity/class/gender/etc. So, in order to help balance things out, some people have decided to encourage and support minorities going into these still quite homogeneous jobs/fields. I think it's a good thing beyond just deciding that equality should be a core value. The problem with a homogeneous group is that they tend to have had similar experiences and upbringings, and so tend to have similar thoughts and approaches to situations. In a very creative field like science, I think it's a bad thing to have a relatively narrow range of creativity. Having many different perspectives from people with many different backgrounds is good for coming up with new, creative approaches to problems, so I think that diversity is definitely something we want in science.
If a minority excels in school, what's stopping them from joining the field? Discrimination? If you can prove that, then that's a lawsuit. And it should be easy to prove if someone with the credentials is getting passed over in favor of someone in the "majority" who has the same or lesser credentials.
History. Our whole society to date has been set up in a way that makes it more difficult for members of the 'minority' to succeed, compared to members of the majority. The problem isn't even necessarily active discrimination (which I think it's harder in practice to prove discrimination than you think). I think passive discrimination is a much bigger problem, because even well-meaning people don't realize they're being discriminatory in some way. For example, it can be very hard for an "outsider" to fit in with a homogeneous majority group different than the outsider's. Even if the majority group is trying to be inclusive to the outsider, there are many ways in which cultural misunderstandings can easily alienate the outsider. Furthermore, just as easy as it would be for a 'minority person' to claim discrimination if they were passed over for the job, if an excelling minority individual kept rising through the ranks at their company, it's just as easy for the homogeneous group members to believe the 'outsider' is being treated specially because they are a minority, which can lead to resentment among the majority members.
If the environment is not hospitable to a 'minority' individual, even just due to "benign" ignorance on the part of the otherwise well-meaning majority group, it raises barriers for even talented minorities to succeed in these fields. This is why we need programs to help bring down these barriers and form a more-inclusive society.
Such as? I'm a white male physics major struggling with the curriculum. I need to know of those advantages so I can start doing better, because I'm clueless as to what they are.
That's exactly the problem: most white males are clueless as to the advantages they have because those advantages are basically there by default, so you don't even notice them.
For example, are most physics majors in your program also white males? Do any of them work together on homework problems? How easy is/was it for white males in your program to make friends? When there's lots of people who look like you and share your cultural background, the barriers to talking to them and getting to know them are much less than if you're the lone outsider trying to make friends. But unless we've ever tried to fit in with a group unlike ourselves, we often don't realize how difficult it can be for an outsider trying to fit in with our group.
InvalidID said:
I want to do this, but I feel a little guilty.
We were mostly kind of interested in finding out if they really would give the scholarship to a male. We figured at the time that if they wanted to give the scholarship to a woman, they would. I certainly hope they weren't forced to give the scholarship to my friend when they had a qualified female applicant they could have awarded it to.
leroyjenkens said:
1) He was talking about me being IN the majority, so he was talking specifically about me.
2) We're talking about professions, and white males aren't the majority in all of them.
3) I care.
I was also making probabilistic statements, though. While I don't know personal things about you, I was saying that if you were in the majority, it is statistically likely that you have enjoyed several advantages of being a white male, even if you haven't been aware of it, for aforementioned reasons.
So women aren't becoming physicists because they're effectively poorer than white men? There's more women in college than men.
So since there's more women in college than men, why aren't more of them in physics?
I don't worry about anything else because I'm wise with money. I only have a part time job, but I live on my own, pay all my bills, and have about 20k saved up. I'm not in this position because I'm a white male. I've worked for everything I have. I'm working at UPS (anyone can get that job) and whites aren't even the majority.
But again, we're talking about professions. I heard there were scholarships for men to get into nursing simply because they're a minority in that field. That's the issue I have. Personally, I prefer having a female nurse in the hospital, but aside from that, I don't see the reason why we need minorities (including white men, in some professions) to get into professions they might not normally join, simply because there's "not enough of them."
What about people who would prefer to have a male nurse available? Are they not reason enough to encourage more males to go into nursing?
While it's possible that you may indeed have worked for everything you have now and did not get to enjoy white male privilege, to be honest, your arguments sound exactly like the sort of thing that someone in a privileged group would be arguing when someone else is trying to chip away at their privilege. This is, in essence, the problem of having a privileged group in society. A privileged individual thinks things are fine the way they are because society already favors them, and they don't want that taken away. Even a well-meaning privileged individual can be blind to the plight of the unprivileged. This is only an attitude one can afford so long as their privileged group remains on top. The ways things are going with Asia's current economic group and the Western world's continued economic difficulties, white upper class males may not be the privileged group for much longer. If and when that day comes, perhaps all of us will have a better appreciation for the struggles non-white males have endured in the recent decades.
