In fairness, I don't think the lack of Nobel prizes is a valid criticism here. The average time from discovery to a Nobel is close to 30 years at the moment and the Saudis built their first major research university (KAUST) in 2009 and their first university ever in 1961. Their economy started to grow after they got some control over their oil in 1972 so let's say a decade after that is when they could be expected to start spending to any significant degree on research. That only gives them roughly 40 years to get a Nobel which is not enough without systematic support from foreign governments and universities which was not there due to wars, politics, and some internal Saudi policies that limited their ability to attract experts and get access to the latest advanced technologies.
Square Kufic is easy to read for native readers when you add diacritical marks and keep the general order along a path. You'll often see words or phrases repeated or flipped to make cool geometric designs, which is easy to spot for native readers but often confusing for others.
The Reem Kufi font [0] is even easier to read and rather popular on trendy Arabic websites and publications.
The pixelated font is called square kufic. Kufic script in general is very angular as opposed to flowing, think monospace font vs cursive. You see this in classical mosaics as well as modern decorated buildings, having the straight/right-angle thing going on is either more complementary for being part of the architecture or is a material constraint of having square tile to work with or trying to make sure you're applying the text to the building in a way that is "plumb square".
So Reem Kufic is a modern font that has the same goal as the classical, square kind.
At least partly. When I was starting out, I would apply to dev positions only to get offers to interview for lower-paid QA positions. After changing to a gender-neutral nickname and removing all female-identifying terms from my resume, I got the interviews for dev positions.
You claim "at least partly" and then proceed to prove it with anecdotal evidence. You'd need to prove it with a study similar to the ones that send identical CVs to companies, just changing one thing, which is what they want to discover if there's bias against.
I am not obliged to defend every statement I make with a study for my thoughts and experiences to be worth sharing. Also, anecdotal evidence is evidence. Not as generalizable as controlled studies but not as worthless as you seem to think.
In any case, I have done the five minutes of googling you seem to want. Biases in evaluating resumes based on gender and other such factors are not new nor unknown: here is an early study from 1986[1], 1988[2], 1999[3], 2001[4], 2007[5]. Feel free to visit google scholar and look more studies by yourself.
Interestingly, when those resume studies are more narrowly focused on Silicon Valley tech firms women experience a significant bonus relative to men [1].
You can sure share your thoughts, and I can share my thoughts on whether you're correct, I'm just pointing out it's not proven your personal experience proves discrimination is part of the explanation.
None of those studies support your original claim. They support the more broader claim that women are discriminated in the job market.
> Not as generalizable as controlled studies but not as worthless as you seem to think.
Sorry, a single data point, by itself, when you share it attempting to generalize, is worse than worthless, since it can be terribly misleading.
I see why you may think that way, but I don't think you're right.
I guess for you it's a given QA jobs are "inferior" to SWE jobs. I guess you believe the articles you linked proof women tend to get "inferior" jobs just because they're women? (I haven't read the articles, although I believe this to be true).
I just can't make the jump that this applies to QA jobs (granting they are "inferior"). That would imply "inferior" jobs are always overrepresented by women, and there are counterexamples to this, by almost any definition of "inferior".
So talking about generalities, there are plenty of statistics that show that women have lower paying jobs and get paid less even for the same jobs. We can argue about the reasons but the fact that they are paid less has been shown many times, so if you are disputing it you should be provide some compelling evidence.
So the the question is are QA jobs lower paid or not. That's easy to check and is a pretty good (though not perfect) indicator of status. A quick Google would have shown you that this is generally the case. Funnily enough you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
> So talking about generalities, there are plenty of statistics that show that women have lower paying jobs
Yes, that's not disputed by anyone serious.
> and get paid less even for the same jobs.
Also yes, but only if you don't account for hours worked and experience. A Harvard study found that after accounting for both the type of job and hours worked [1]. Google actually found women were paid more than male employees working the same job [2].
In short, the pay gap definitely exists in the sense that women's average pay check is less than the average man's. But there's not much evidence of discrimination in pay. Men make more because they work different jobs, work longer hours, and stay in their field for longer.
Also,
> you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
One, this isn't calling QA "inferior". Compensation is not a moral judgement of work. Pointing out the fact that coding isn't a requirement explains why there's a larger potential labor pool and thus lower pay. My first job in QA was doing manual testing, following a script of things to check on canary and staging builds. I was paid $12.50 an hour. This wasn't some moral judgement about the value of this job, it's the fact that pretty much anyone could do it so there's no reason to offer more than minimum wage.
> We can argue about the reasons but the fact that they are paid less has been shown many times, so if you are disputing it you should be provide some compelling evidence
I state I believe this is true in one of my previous comments.
> So the the question is are QA jobs lower paid or not. That's easy to check and is a pretty good (though not perfect) indicator of status. A quick Google would have shown you that this is generally the case. Funnily enough you will also find lots of dismissive posts which shows that at least some people think QA jobs are inferior, because "they don't code, but just use the software".
This could be, but you need something else to prove it, otherwise lower paying jobs with different distributions than the job market distribution are always root caused in discrimination, is this your argument? There are many high paying jobs that result in a huge selection bias with respect to employees, just because many people simply don't want to put the hours. And thus discrimination is not the whole story in these cases. It may be the case in QA teams though (or part of the story), I'm simply saying it needs more research.
Nevertheless this hasn't been my point, my point is simply a single data point by itself can't be used to account for part of the explanation.
The average salaries in QA are noticeably lower than those in SWE, so those are indeed "inferior jobs" - i.e. less attractive, and pushing some group from one to the other would be discriminatory because it would underpay that group.
Good, did I deny this? I'm simply asking for proof and saying what has been provided in this thread is insufficient.
By the way, lower salary doesn't mean "inferior", there are very high paying jobs, very stressful, that I wouldn't want, and work life balance is a huge component of a job.
Obviously not, see my other comment. Anecdotal evidence is part of the evidence, it doesn't allow you to claim part of the explanation is your anecdotal evidence.
Every number is a number, including zero. Therefore some number of members of any given group have been discriminated against. Therefore any group is indeed discriminated against. You can't argue with objective mathematical proof.
Slightly more seriously, if someone is discriminated against for being part of a group, you don't get to appeal to the fallacy of composition applied to all groups in order to claim that there is no discrimination against that individual. Yes, yes, you're not actually writing out that argument, you're just leaving its ingredients lying around next to a naked flame.
I would argue that you are overestimating the help women used to get from extended families in terms of protection from abuse. That kind of life came along with rigid societal expectations, extremely limited economic opportunities for women, and harsh views on divorce.
Many cultures around the world still have such communities and they are worse on average for women.
As far as I know, in the US, the custody and house/apartment is almost always given to the parent who /wants/ the children. Men often don't fight for custody. They should.
Also, the division of assets is not out of proportion I think. If I got married and my partner left the workforce to take care of the home/children, I do think they should get their fair share of assets in case of divorce.
Do you have a study for this? When I researched it briefly years ago it seems when men ask for custody they often get exactly the custody they ask for, and the narrative they don’t is something largely spread by people who are either ignorant or men who were denied custody for heinous examples of abuse. Men simply ask for custody less or ask for less custody broadly.
> noting that nearly 30% of fathers surveyed did not want physical custody
> The outcome matched the re-quest for maternal custody in nearly 90% of such cases. See id. In contrast, paternal physical custody was awarded in only 75%
> in a 1992 study of 1,124 divorced families, 67.6% of children lived with their mothers; 15% lived with both parents on a joint custody basis; and only 9.5% lived with their fathers
This fails to correct for how many fathers won't even ask for custody because there's such a low chance of getting it.
If it was the 19th century and I observed that most women who took the bar exam passed the bar exam, would that prove that men and women were on an equal footing?
> If it was the 19th century and I observed that most women who took the bar exam passed the bar exam, would that prove that men and women were on an equal footing?
It would require other evidence (of which there is plenty, for the 19th century legal training pipeline, including explicit institutional discrimination) to show the bias.
But other evidence isn't just an unsupported narrative.
This was published well over 20 years ago. Do you have anything more reflective of modern days? Taking it at face value, assuming nothing has changed (a big assumption) it’s still the case that the vast majority of men who ask for custody are awarded custody.
I'm not sure how you possibly reached that conclusion.
~30% of men don't want ANY custody. Yet ~67% of children live only with their mother.
Assuming that 100% of children that the father didn't want go to the mother (they don't - some go to the system or relatives) - that means in 47% of the other cases, the mother gets FULL custody.
So this means for 100% of those 47% of cases, the father did not want the mother to get FULL custody, but that's what the court decided.
The ugly apartment buildings you are seeing are probably one-plus-five buildings (one concrete + five wood floors) that are actually optimized for balancing zoning+codes+affordability for single-family apartments. At least theoretically, they should offer cheaper rent due to their much lower construction costs.
I think of the ugliness of the facades as a bonus that would drive wealthier people to other buildings once options open up a bit.
Yeah, it's those, I just couldn't recall the term for it. Much of the ugliness seems to be a choice, though—lots of weird, haphazard nooks and crannies and bump-outs, and bizarre color schemes that seem designed to dazzle you into not noticing how ugly the unevenly-bumpy exterior is. If they just flattened out the exterior walls a little and cooled it a bit with the crayon-box color scheme, they'd look much better.
In many cases, the superfluous nooks and crannies on 5-over-1's are mandated by local zoning rules that call for "façade articulation" on buildings occupying larger amounts of street frontage (I suppose to conceal the unthinkable horror of a big building existing in a city).
It is an obvious pattern known to anyone who visited or attended Eastern European or Middle Eastern universities.
Here is an example I saw recently: Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi is a STEM research-focused university and close to 60% of their students are female. They have no "soft" majors and most students have to achieve and maintain high performance to stay enrolled and get scholarships that cover their tuition or even give them stipends if they are in the top of their class. I saw female students happily working on robotics, FPGA designs, security CTFs, etc. They would be shocked to see how common it is to be the single woman in a classroom in other countries.
I don't have the study at hand, but almost all parts of the Muslim world that do not restrict women from study have a lot of female STEM interest. I think it was Egypt that had a significant amount of women in IT, too, but I don't recall the finer details.
