Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Female Candidates (Part 1)

There has recently been a lot of discussion recently regarding females being under-represented in SU elections on campus.

Quite a lot. All over the place. Honestly. Well, ok, mostly at the Wanderer and all over Facebook.

Frankly, yes, this is an issue. While there are no established barriers to female candidates, we cannot deny that there simply aren't any female candidates this year, and I would further venture that we can't deny that this is a bad thing - this really ought to be addressed.

Unfortunately, everyone seems to have wildly differing opinions as to why this phenomenon is occurring. While y'all can go debate fancy things like sociology, I'm thinking of (over the next little while) taking a look at it from a statistical point of view. Who knows - perhaps this could be similar to the Berkeley Sex Bias case I wrote about earlier, and the problems are more fundamental and basic. Who knows indeed...

In the meantime, here's a fancy thing I learned how to make after looking around on the internet. Enjoy! The size of each block is the size of the faculty, and the colour represents the faculty fraction that is female (with green meaning overwhelmingly female, and red being overwhelmingly male).

EDIT: Source Google Visualization API Sample

1 comment:

G said...

So essentially it's only engineering that still needs a Famous Five to evolve towards equality (Education faculty is still equal because female dominance is still considered equality ;)