by PaulHoule | 2025-07-16 21:40:40+00:00
I just heard a lot of women students in the elevator who were complaining about how there were very few women teachers in physics, math, and computer science.

I felt a little flustered and blurted out the name of a female professor in physics who (1) I really like but (2) is a nepo baby. (Didn’t tell them that latter) I mean the real equity problem in academia is that almost every professor is a professor’s kid

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9755046/

which was something I had gathered from my own observations and only saw research that confirmed it two decades later. Insofar as we think in terms of certain ‘protected classes’ you can see that the nepo baby who is in a protected class (at least half of them!) is a hot commodity.

Unfortunately we are in an impoverished discourse between woke right NPCs who take it for granted you bellyfeel DEI is bad and those who reflexively oppose them because it is DEI is ‘just’ what every decent human being endorses.

There is the principle that you ‘never let them see you sweat’ and at work I am not so likely to complain about the challenges I’ve had in my career coming from a lower class white family and having an unfashionable and slightly terrifying neurodivergence and I’ve never expected to get a lot of help from HR. When I do talk about those struggles I try to talk about them in a universalized way.

I wish sometimes we could make ‘white’ go away as it comprises groups such as:

(1) myself, from French-Canadian and Polish background who barely exist in media and academia, but boy even the girls in my extended family are cops and firefighters. I get good service from the police because of the way I look and the way I listen they seem to believe, true or not, I will take their admonitions seriously and don’t need to get a ticket or see the judge. I know also it is not that way for black people. Some of those first responder jobs are good union jobs so yeah, maybe some of them are nepo babies.

From that kind of background you could probably break into highly formalized areas such as law and medicine but if you tried to go into less formalized area you’d find yourself in a highly nerve-wracking hall of mirrors and I’m certain black people would have all the same problems and then some.

(2) Jewish people who are I think dangerously overrepresented in some areas (even Ezra Klein says they are behaving in ways now that make people believe the awful things that people have long said about them) and who really were crawling up by their wits against discrimination 75 years ago but are benefitting more from the ‘nepo baby’ phenomenon today. A person like that get disowned by their family for getting a job in law enforcement, and…

… I have felt so cringe sitting in the passenger seat while an upper middle class person argued their way into a $300 ticket which I could have avoided by being a little stupid and sheepish. ‘Sharp elbowed’ can cost you sometimes.

(3) Scotts-Irish people who I think have some biological (might be environment to epigenetic though) predisposition to mental illness and often seem to have

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

and often come across as “white people with black problems”, especially the random encounters with the police that become life changing.

If we have some frame like “women in tech” I think somewhere between 25% to 75% of the problems they have are problems that are not due to their protected status —- and that frame cuts them off from a proper understanding of some of their problems and also from solidarity with others who face those problems.