[frossie]

Wow, it was hard to look past all the offensive crap to get angry at all the logic holes. Let me see if I can keep this PG.

>age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month >age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year

Actually the median total time to degree is far lower for STEM than it is for other fields. TTD in Physics and Astronomy is 7.0 years compared to 10.2 in the Humanities

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf06312/nsf06312.pdf

>compensation for executives at public companies is reported every year.

Yes, becaues Forbes executive positions are SO much more open to women that academic scientific careers, it makes total sense to compare them.

>Consider taking the same high IQ and work ethic, going into business, and being put on the fast track at a company such as General Electric. Rather than being fired at age 44, this is about the time that she will be handed ever-larger divisions to operate, with ever-larger bonuses and stock options.

A tenured academic has the same chance of being fired as GE employee. Or it's just as easy to be a postdoc as a GE stock-option executive. Yeah right.

> At age 22, the schoolteacher is earning a living wage and can begin making plans to get married and have children.

Because every woman aspires to have babies at 22.

> "I'm not sure if I'll be able to get any job at all.

Note that when a grad student says that, there is ALWAYS an implicit "... on what I would prefer doing".

Unemployment rate for Physics PhDs is just under 10% - this is rough the same for any occupation in the "professional" sector if you consider involuntary part-time workers (not many part time science jobs)

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/articles/technology/t...

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat21.htm

> A woman who is smart and organized enough to earn a PhD in science would also likely be smart and organized enough to find a higher-income co-parent. What is the profit potential when suing someone earning more than $250,000 per year?

Yes, because (a) women use their career skills in finding husbands and (b) being a physicist and suing a rich ex for alimony are comparable choices - after all, why else would you be marrying? You have to be effing kidding me.

> The most serious concern is that the field that a youngster found fascinating at age 20 will no longer be fascinating after 20 or 25 years.

Yes, because only scientists get bored with their careers. Every person who decided to do advertising sales on the other hand, is still having a blast.

> A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals

Right, guys do science cause they are too dumb to know better. And people become petty criminals as a career choice. And don't forget women don't do anything as pointless as playing video games (I mean ha ha ha, next you're going to tell me that women PLAY videogames, imagine).

Look, the postdoc system ubiquitous in STEM is exploitative. Every person working in science, man or woman, knows this. And it's a perverse outcome of a funding and success model based on citation rate.

But to say women don't go into science because they're too smart for that is the same as saying that African Americans don't go into IT because they too smart want to hang around geeks and carry a pager. It's insulting to everybody concerned and completely and utterly inaccurate.

[dgabriel]

The stuff about child support is actively gross and totally incorrect. Median child support in the US is ~$500/mo; vanishingly few people have the kind of money he's talking about.

http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p60-246.pdf

[ArmchairEcon]

That the average person who pursues a job is not very successful economically does not mean that the job is not worth pursuing for someone who is thoughtful and talented. As noted above, if the median child support is only $6000 tax-free dollars per year that suggests that high-income potential fathers are an underutilized resource.

http://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/c... shows that the median computer programmer gets paid $75,000 per year. That doesn't stop thoughtful and talented programmers from earning a lot more (though collusion by employers, e.g., Apple, has interfered with what would have been a market).

[Fomite]

Yeah, this article was terrible - both full of some serious holes in its actual facts, and then dripping with sloppy reasoning.

[cozzyd]

Its most serious flaw is the assumption that everyone cares about money as much as he does.

[ArmchairEcon]

"Unemployment rate for Physics PhDs is just under 10%" -- that sounds pretty bad if you assume that someone with a physics PhD is smarter than average and has more years of education than average.