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Catherine Hawkins's avatar

There's a lot of discussion about how academia is being "feminized", with too much focus on emotional safety and conformity. People talk about it like it's being forced on academia from somewhere else, but I think this article is right that it's a natural consequence of how funding and administration have changed. Funding agencies now are very focused on large, interdisciplinary, collaborative projects, with the idea that this complexity will make the work more innovative. These projects take a certain level of soft skills to manage, and I suspect the money involved makes agencies gravitate to "safe" projects, since they don't want to have to explain to the government why they wasted millions on high-risk, high-reward ideas that didn't pan out. It can be very hard to tell whether a Weird Nerd is a genius or a crank. Universities are also more bureaucratic now and demand more faculty involvement in cooperative, non-intellectual tasks - terrible for Weird Nerds, great for agreeable, conscientious people (aka women). This has probably created a positive feedback loop, where as norms get more feminine, academia attracts more women, who make norms even more feminine, etc.

However, I also suspect that many academics welcomed the initial push to these norms because "Weird Nerds" can come with a lot of conflict and drama of their own. I'm talking departments where half the members wouldn't speak to each other, screaming matches and throwing chairs in the audience at conferences, even a fistfight between an advisor and student - all stories about men from my field 30+ years ago, when women were still rare. The conflict and drama has a different flavor now, but I think academia has always been kind of unstable and dysfunctional, and people are being naive to think it would return to some rational golden age if we just got rid of all the women.

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Michael's avatar

I don't quite agree that the group pushing out the weird nerds are "Failed Corporatist" types. The shift I observe is that there are now a lot of "Successful Corporatists" who could easily have elite careers in finance or consulting, who pursue science because they prefer it.

Imagine someone who, at the end of their undergraduate degree, made a choice between an offer from McKinsey or FAANG (depending on the type of person) and an offer from a top 10 PhD program in their field. They are sociable and good at networking. They have normal, legible hobbies: perhaps moderately skilled at a musical instrument, likely athletic and pursuing an endurance sport in a serious but not competitive way. No one would say they are a genius but they have solid ideas, pursue them well, and are very competent and pleasant to work with. And they never have the "basket case" type of problems you get where the Weird Nerds just sometimes fail to do their jobs.

I think this is an increasingly common type of person, who is very attractive to recruit. They are not just politicians, they can actually be very good scientists. But you get enough of them, and the environment does become very neurotypical.

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