Jobs
pgleick | February 14, 2013Invest in the future. And especially, invest in sustainable, effective job creation in the water sector. The result will be millions of new jobs – a significant result.
That is the key message from a new analysis just released today by the Pacific Institute on sustainable water jobs in the United States. That study, Sustainable Water Jobs: A National Assessment of Water-Related Green Job Opportunities, finds that proactive investments increasing efficient water use, improving water quality, expanding smart water treatment and re-use, and more will address growing problems associated with…
drorzel | September 25, 2012There's been a lot of bloggage recently about a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicating bias toward male students on the part of faculty who thought they were evaluating an application for a laboratory manager. Half of the faculty in the study were given an application with "Jennifer" at the top, the other half one with "John" as the first name, and both male and female faculty rated the male student more highly, and would offer the male student a higher salary. Sean Carroll and Ilana Yurkiewicz talk about the study and the results in more detail.
So,…
drorzel | April 27, 2012Somebody on Twitter linked this article about "brogrammers", which is pretty much exactly as horrible as that godawful neologism suggests. In between descriptions of some fairly appalling behavior, though, they throw some stats at you, and that's where it gets weird:
As it is, women remain acutely underrepresented in the coding and engineering professions. According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics study, in 2011 just 20 percent of all programmers were women. A smaller percentage of women are earning undergraduate computer science degrees today than they did in 1985, according to the National…
lborkowski | December 29, 2011While we're on vacation, we're re-posting content from earlier in the year. This post was originally published on May 12, 2011.
By Liz Borkowski
For many years, the public health and environmental communities have been calling for reform of the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), which governs the use of chemicals in US commerce. Instead of requiring companies to demonstrate the safety of chemicals they intend to use or produce, TSCA puts the burden on EPA to request this data and justify their request based on anticipated hazards or substantial human exposures. EPA can only ban or…
drorzel | November 12, 2011Someone from the American Astronomical Society ran across the Project for Non-Academic Science posts here, and is looking for someone to participate in a career panel at their upcoming meeting in Austin, TX:
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) Employment Committee is hosting a panel discussion at our annual AAS winter meeting in Austin on current issues related to the postdoc job market, with a focus on the increase in post-doc type positions without a corresponding growth in potential permanent academic positions. The session will be on Wednesday, January 11th from 10-11:30 am. They are…
drorzel | August 31, 2011A currently popular explanation for the increasing price of higher education is that all those tuition dollars are being soaked up by bloated bureaucracy-- that is, that there are too many administrators for the number of faculty and students involved. While I like this better than the "tenured faculty are greedy and lazy" explanation you sometimes hear, I'm not sure it's any more valid. In part because proponents make it difficult to see if it's any more valid.
One of the major proponents of the administrative bloat idea is Benjamin Ginsberg, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, who is…
mikethemadbiologist | August 29, 2011One of the ludicrous notions that has infected our political discourse is that government jobs aren't 'real' jobs (tell that to fireman when your house is burning down...). But a lot of private sector jobs are heavily subsidized by the government. I'm not referring to private contractors hired by the government, but jobs that are supposedly private sector. Low wage private sector jobs. How are these jobs subsidized? Food stamps (now known as SNAP; italics mine):
Saucedo, who earns $9.70 an hour for about 26 hours a week and lives with her mother, is one of the many Americans who survive…
mikethemadbiologist | August 25, 2011...imaginary jobs that might or might not materialize. As a long-time customer of New Balance shoes (not only do I like the shoes, but they're U.S. made), it looks like a 'free'* trade agreement will kill off 1,000 existing jobs in Maine (italics mine):
At the factory here owned by New Balance, the last major athletic shoe brand to manufacture footwear in the United States, even workers on the shop floor recognize that in purely economic terms, the operation doesn't make sense.
The company could make far more money if, like Nike and Adidas, it shifted virtually all of these jobs to low-wage…
drorzel | August 24, 2011I don't think my point quite got across the other day, so let me try phrasing this another way. I think a lot of what's being written about pseudonymity on blogs is missing the real point.
The really important question here is not so much whether blog networks should allow pseudonymous blogs as whether employers should allow their employees to blog about what they do in their day jobs. Things like the much-cited Epi-Ren case are not really evidence of the risk of blogging under your own name, they're evidence of the risk of blogging when your employer doesn't want you to.
Pseudonymity is a…
drorzel | August 22, 2011The whole issue of pseudonymity has come up again, both on Google+ and on ScienceBlogs. While I've been on the Internet for nigh on 20 years, my initial point of entry was through a Usenet group that strongly preferred real names (or something real-name-ish). As a result, I've never tried to maintain a separate Internet name-- all of my Usenet posting and all of my blogging has been under my real name. So I don't have a great deal invested in the question, on a personal level.
There are a couple of points, though, that I think are worth making about the recent discussion:
1) There's a much-…
drorzel | August 10, 2011The other big gender-disparity graph making the rounds yesterday was this one showing the gender distribution in the general workforce and comparing that to science-related fields:
This comes from an Economics and Statistics Administration report which has one of the greatest mismatches between the tone of the headline of the press release and the tone of the report itself. Nice work, Commerce Department PR flacks.
There are a couple of oddities about this report, the most important being that they appear to have excluded academics from the sample, though that probably depends on how people…
drorzel | August 10, 2011There are two recent studies of gender disparities in science and technology (referred to by the faintly awful acronym "STEM") getting a lot of play over the last few days. As is often the case with social-science results, the data they have aren't quite the data you would really like to have, and I think it's worth poking at them a little, not to deny the validity of the results, but to point out the inherent limitations of the process.
The first is a study of lifetime earnings in various fields that includes this graph showing that women with a Ph.D. earn about the same amount as men with a…
mikethemadbiologist | August 7, 2011About the decrease in U3 unemployment (the 'strict' measure) from 9.2% to 9.1% (which, of course, beats the alternative increase): well, that's the good news. The bad news is that the employment rate actually dropped 58.2% to 58.1%. Among men, we hit another all-time historical low. So how do you have a lower unemployment rate and a lower employment rate?
It's very simple. People with jobs are employed (duh). Unemployed people are:
Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work.…
mikethemadbiologist | August 3, 2011I do so wish we still had Democrats who bring the righteous thunder instead of sounding like mealy-mouth technocrats (although "Satan-sandwich" was kinda funny). Sadly, you're stuck with me instead.
Anyway, by way of Bill Mitchell, we come across a report (pdf) that has the rather dry title of "The "Jobless and Wageless" Recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-2009: The Magnitude and Sources of Economic Growth Through 2011 I and Their Impacts on Workers, Profits, and Stock Values." But I assure you it tells a story that will raise your blood pressure. While there are a couple 'abused…
mikethemadbiologist | July 20, 2011While I've disagreed strongly with Megan McArdle, she recently wrote one of the more humane pieces I've read in the mainstream media about unemployment and underemployment (italics mine):
I was unemployed for basically two years between the time I graduated from business school in 2001, and the time I accepted a job with The Economist in 2003. I was much luckier than most people in that situation, both because my parents let me stay in their spare bedroom, and because I was working during much of that time--freelancing, flirting with a start up, doing some tech consulting, and of course,…
mikethemadbiologist | July 15, 2011We should be worrying about the employment deficit. Instead, we are worried about the budget deficit. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Nate Silver has a very good post detailing how the Republicans in Congress have positioned themselves to the right of....everybody. But what struck me is that nowhere in the poll would one have even been given the option of responding that the budget deficit is not a serious problem (really, look it up. You can't answer that).
I want to nip one common complaint in the bud: if our GDP-debt ratio soars, no one will buy our debt (T-bills). This is…
mikethemadbiologist | July 13, 2011The Atlantic is being paid some unknown amount of money by McKinsey and Co. (the same people who brought you some very nice healthcare propaganda) to discuss this:
The Atlantic and McKinsey & Company brought together some of the top minds in business, government, and the world of ideas, each to answer the same question: What is the single best thing Washington can do to jumpstart job creation?
Matthew Yglesias has the best idea of the bunch, which is to moderately increase inflation. But then the other neo-liberal bromides are trotted: job training, tax credits to spur innovation, and…
mikethemadbiologist | July 12, 2011I think one reason that the Obama adminstration (including the preznit) don't comprehend the level of anger about the economy is that many of them dwell in a world where they possess economic agency, whereas too many people do not. John Lanchester writes (italics mine):
From the worm's-eye perspective which most of us inhabit, the general feeling about this new turn in the economic crisis is one of bewilderment. I've encountered this in Iceland and in Ireland and in the UK: a sense of alienation and incomprehension and done-unto-ness. People feel they have very little economic or political…
mikethemadbiologist | July 12, 2011With last week's release of the latest month's unemployment data, it's worth remembering that the official figures would be far worse were it not for our policy of mass incarceration (aka the War on Drugs). Why? Because people in jail (mostly men) are 'disappeared' from unemployment and employment statistics. And we imprison a lot of people. Most of the numbers I'm finding put the prison population at 2.3 million. In terms of incarceration rates, since 1980 (before the War on People Who Use Drugs), we have had an effective tripling of the prison population. So that's roughly 1.5 million…
mikethemadbiologist | July 9, 2011A while ago, I discussed the record low rate of male employment in the U.S. Well, Mike Konczal also has that figure (why read anyone but the Mad Biologist. We are always firstest...). But he notes some other jarring data:
You have to go back to pre-1988 to find an era when there were a fewer percentage of women working than there are right now.
You've come a long way, baby. If you have a job, things suck too:
Meanwhile, how's the economy working out for those with jobs? Average weekly earnings of all private employees dropped from $791.20 to $788.56. We can't really have an inflationary…