One Factor That Influences The Use Of The Labels Soft Science Or Hard Science Is Gender Bias, According

More women in a STEM field leads people to label it as a 'soft science,' according to new research

When women make up more than 25% of graduate students in a discipline, men—and to a lesser extent women—become less interested in pursuing that discipline, and salaries tend to go down.

One factor that influences the use of the labels “soft science” or “hard science” is gender bias, according to recent research my colleagues and I conducted.

Women’s participation varies across STEM disciplines. While women have nearly reached gender parity in biomedical sciences, they still make up only about 18% of students receiving undergraduate degrees in computer science, for instance.

In a series of experiments, we varied the information study participants read about women’s representation in fields like chemistry, sociology and biomedical sciences. We then asked them to categorize these fields as either a “soft science” or a “hard science.”

Across studies, participants were consistently more likely to describe a discipline as a “soft science” when they’d been led to believe that proportionally more women worked in the field. Moreover, the “soft science” label led people to devalue these fields—describing them as less rigorous, less trustworthy and less deserving of federal research funding.

Continue Reading.

I still can't believe that this is canon. Stanford Pines really took a trigonometry book and said: "Hear me out!"

Poor Fiddleford :(

Maybe I should stop telling people that I'm a biologist. I had a guy try to explain to me how Black and White people are actually different species because Black people can't donate bone marrow to White people and vice versa.

And I was like ???

Buddy, not every person can donate their bone marrow to you, you need an extremely close match, which usually means someone from your family. Like, of course that an Italian won't be a bone marrow donor to someone from DR Congo like what???

I tried explaining him that and he told me that all biologists are stupid because they just follow what Darwin said and support woke ideology. At that point I gave up.

Happy fall equinox!

Bonus: gorgeous Japanese anemone flower!

I have an AI bro in my class 😭

He just sent us simplified Chat GPT version of our textbook and I want to die. I checked it and of course that there’s blatant errors. But he claims that it’s better to study from it than from the original textbook because it’s shorter 😭

And other students told me to stop talking about AI because it’s going to be the future and they already use it to write all of their essays.

I hate this reality.

This guy looked at me once and my soul was his.