Welcome to your Wednesday open thread. This has been an interesting week in Delaware politics. Anthony DeLuca is in trouble and the story on the basketball pole went national (it was featured on Glenn Beck’s radio show and website). What else is on your mind?
All I can say about this story is :eyeroll:. Rep. Sean Duffy From Wisconsin says his Congressional salary of nearly $200,000/yr is hard to live on but Wisconsin public employees need to take a pay cut.
At a town hall meeting in Polk County, Wisconsin earlier this year, Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) was asked whether he’d vote to cut his $174,000 annual salary. Duffy sort of hedged, and went on to talk about how $174,000 really isn’t that much for his family of seven to live on. Then he went on to say he supports cutting compensation for all public employees, along the lines of what Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) has proposed for the Badger State.
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Here’s what Duffy says about his salary:
I can guarantee you, or most of you, I guarantee that I have more debt than all of you. With 6 kids, I still pay off my student loans. I still pay my mortgage. I drive a used minivan. If you think I’m living high on the hog, I’ve got one paycheck. So I struggle to meet my bills right now. Would it be easier for me if I get more paychecks? Maybe, but at this point I’m not living high on the hog.
Duffy also said that he pays more in health care costs and retirement savings than he did when he was a district attorney before he ran for Congress. That said, Duffy said he’d support the idea of “public employees across the board” taking a compensation cut.
“Let’s all join hands together and say ‘I’ll take a pay decrease, absolutely,” Duffy said.
Hey, I’m sure with 6 kids and 2 residences, he is not rolling in money. But he makes almost 10x what his average constituent makes and he has health insurance for his own family. Why does he think that Wisconsinites should get by with less if he’s having trouble?
In a complete non-surprise, a survey found that women leave engineering because of misogyny.
One popular explanation for the dearth of women in science and engineering fields has been that women freely choose to leave these fields in order to spend more time with family. However, a new report shows that, at least for engineering, that isn’t the whole story.
In Stemming The Tide: Why Women Leave Engineering, two University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors report on their survey of over 3,700 women with engineering degrees. They found that just one in four women who had left the field reported doing so to spend more time with family. One third left “because they did not like the workplace climate, their boss or the culture,” while almost half departed due to “working conditions, too much travel, lack of advancement or low salary” (respondents were allowed to check more than one reason). The researchers also found that among women who got engineering degrees but never entered the field, a third made that decision “because of their perceptions of engineering as being inflexible or the engineering workplace culture as being non-supportive of women.” And, unsurprisingly, “Women engineers who were treated in a condescending, patronizing manner, and were belittled and undermined by their supervisors and co-workers were most likely to want to leave their organizations.” Writes study author Dr. Nadya Fouad, “Bottom line — it’s not all about family for most of the women who left engineering.”
I’m not at all surprised by this. The differing levels of support do play a role in why women leave physical science fields. There’s basically no support for women in science, an very, very few mentors to help navigate the problems. I’m just waiting for someone to tell me how women are overreacting or something.