SlateStarCodex does an impressive survey on sexual harrassment experiences, finds those in STEM professions (men and women) report the lowest amount of harrasment slatestarcodex.com
Quelle surprise! Those in the more humanistic, gender-balanced professions report more harassment. I am so shocked! How can this be when I read of journos going to parties to write impressionistic pieces on “Silicon Valley’s harassment problem?”
Could it be that the lopsided gender ratios in STEM actually give women more power to demand respect because so many men, quite a few socially inept, are competing for them? While the scummy art professor delights in the co-eds competing for his time?
I think the best part of this piece is the check though, clever & cool. The survey asks for both reports of at-work & out-of-work harassment rates. In the vapid journo narrative on Silicon Valley, at-work/off tim rates for STEM people ought differ greatly..
But he finds that reports of harrassment correlate more across person than field. That is, you don’t see evidence of a field-specific “culture of harrassment”. I see this as sexual harrasment experiences as a highly individuating experience..
and kind of ambiguous, in the sense that harrassment episodes seem likely to occur in the ambiguous facets of courting, that an episode might transact between two people where would have space for highly idiosyncratic interpretation.
That is, the fact that harassment experiences are so specific to individual person seems to suggest it is a difficult thing that craft objective, hard-line rules for the workplace.
