Black and Latina boffins regularly mistaken for janitors, study finds

Can someone please explain to me why both the womens and mens singles Wimbledon winner both get the same money (£1.88) yet the women only play 3/5ths the number of games ?

On a more serious note, in engineering in particular there is a shortage of women entering the subject to study (e.g. compared to biochemistry, etc), no doubt due to various factors, but that in turn has an impact on the gender bias of typical engineering companies and university staff (who tend to reflect the entry stats some 5-20 years previously).

Tackling the issues around that at school age would be a good start.

Or just giving us engineers all much more pay, THEN we would have more uptake :(

More Pay?

Having been through a couple cycles of computer programming being "in" and "out", I assure you that you do not want to be working on a team made mostly of folks who got into the field for the pay. We used to refer to them as "Matchbook Programmers". See also discussions on leaning too heavily of "certificates" when choosing who will implement your Mission Critical projects.

All this is independent of gender. Most of the useless paper-holders were male, as, of course, were most of the staff in general.

I am hopeful that efforts to interest young girls in the filed, or STEM generally, will eventually work out. Of course, the first step is to not actuvely discourage them.

Strange

I've never in my mind stereotyped latin women as janitors.

I do have a stereotype in my head most of them looking hot like Salma Hayek.

Women in particular are proven better at science and technology than men.

These study results should not surise anyone, except commenter who ignorangly and sarcastically refers to Wimbleton player equal winnings as some sort of argument against the facts of the study.

A significant proportion of Americans are always attacking any credible study who shows continual crude and vile racial and gender bias, even in clear situations like those examined.

One can only hope that the propaganda mantras incessantly spewed on the world like USA being "Greatest Nation on Earth", and "Liberty and Justice for All" can finally b laid to rest as without any merit, and those noted real problems of society addressed in a sensible, determined and serious manner.

This cuts both ways

In some neighborhoods, I am assumed to be a police officer.

lavate las manos

So that isn't a wizard training school next door then

Things do change over time, but

not necessarily the way one would think, or might deem to be desirable. Take secretaries. Once upon a time they were all male. Then, by the time I arrived in the world, the term 'secretary' came along with imnplications of referring to leggy women who were either frighteningly competent (but probably still weren;t being paid fairly for the job) or otherwise were merely a male boss's bit of fluff thinly disguised as a co-worker.

Then there's, ooh, train drivers, bus drivers, office managers., journalists, engineers (any type), scientists - all the stereotypes of those when I was little were of women in those sorts of jobs being a rare novelty. In some of those jobs, women are now much more common, not so in others. Who knows why? But there's also the hidden jobs, the ones that keep households going, and there is where the double-whammy for women hits - not only do we still tend to be paid less for doing the same as male colleagues, we still tend to be expected to do the heavy lifting where it comes to that which keeps a household going, too. And it isn;t just men being chauvinistic - many women are chauvinistic about it too. It was seeing and realising this all around me that really drove home to me the truth of Dale Spender's stance on feminism when I was young - that men are not the enemy - they are simply a part of the problem, along with women.

Humans - durned silly, irrational species, eh? :-}

happened to one of our hr bigwigs a few years ago, usa expat over in uk for a year of cv buffing and headcount/benefit slashing before heading home again

she turned up after hours in rather casual dress and the security guards decided she was a cleaner

hr, well, you can imagine h̶o̶w̶ ̶w̶e̶ ̶l̶a̶u̶g̶h̶e̶d̶ the sympathy

People should definitely recognize that in today's world, people belonging to minority groups are now able to achieve lofty goals, and have careers requiring good qualifications and so on. Of course, though, it's also still true that a lot of people belonging to minority groups are stuck as janitors and the like as well. So, given the odds, mistakes like that will continue to be made even in the absence of malice - until there is more opportunity and more equality.

Heading photo?

That doesn't look like a Latina or African-American.

I remember ...

... a brief stint working as an assistant to a brilliant maths professor, whose research was groundbreaking, who could teach as well, and speak about 10 languages. She also had long blonde hair, even longer legs and was quite happy to wear make up.

In two weeks, I lost count of the number of times people asked her if Professor **** was available, whilst nodding in my direction. Not a single person asked me, the assistant, if the professor was about.

I remember from my days as a physics student at Edinburgh in the early 90s, there was this oldish bloke in fatigues who used to shuffle round the labs and corridors keeping things looking tidy. I thought he was a pretty ineffective janitor who should work a bit harder. Turned out to be some bloke called Professor Higgs lost in thought about something or other...!

Well

"Latina researchers reported having to overcome "lazy" stereotypes from colleagues and superiors"

In my opinion good. Humans are lazy, naturally, and we take all sorts of short cuts in perception and judging a book by its cover is one of those lazy things people naturally do. And when things change it takes people longer to adapt to such change and we can only adapt when we encounter change. These people are using their existing assumptions based on experience and now these minorities can challenge that.

We dont check the colour of the sky every day and every night, we assume it is blue or black (or just grey in the UK). This is why some of us get a nice surprise of a sunrise or sunset that takes our experiences and adds to it.