Apologists for the Oppressors
thusspakezuska | August 19, 2007Have you read the Nature editorial? Have you read my earlier post about it? Maybe what you are wanting is a deeper textual analysis of the editorial itself. You've come to the right place.
Men [sick]
Our 1869 mission statement is out of date.
That's what the bitchy, complaining women are making us say.
It was 1833 when the English polymath William Whewell first coined the word 'scientist'. Over subsequent decades, the word gradually replaced such commonly used terms as 'natural philosophers' and 'men of science.
Scientist, you see , actually means "men of science". So even if we changed…
thusspakezuska | August 16, 2007By way of the daily Chronicle of Higher Education, I learned that Nature has made a quantum leap into the...well...sort of into the early part of the 20th century.
In an editorial published online this afternoon, the journal announced that it would amend its mission statement, which appears each week next to its table of contents.
The original statement, which dates to 1869, says that Nature's mission is, among other things, "to aid scientific men themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of natural knowledge throughout the world."
In these tres modern times…
thusspakezuska | July 31, 2007Absinthe has an announcement on her blog about a new online support group for junior female particle physicists.
There is a new online discussion group aimed at junior female particle physicists (up to and including the postdoctoral level). The group allows junior females to talk openly and anonymously with other junior female particle physicists from around the world about career issues that are important to them. Most particle physicists at the junior level are based at large laboratories in Europe and the US. The unique work environment at these labs can lead to workplace issues and…
thusspakezuska | June 29, 2007I've been doing some reading over at Twisty's place this afternoon, and, you know, it's the usual patriarchy-blaming that helps raise your blood pressure. I do admire Twisty's way with a phrase.
Then I came across this post. And it was more than the blood pressure; I wanted to scream in frustration and anger. A precocious 9-year-old girl who's taking classes at a high school, and who has been "singing over her chemistry equations". But then, in an ill-considered move, she turned 10, which apparently was equivalent to posting a sign on her back that read "All males may feel free to…
thusspakezuska | June 19, 2007When I lived in North Carolina, I got to know a woman who worked in one of the Research Triangle labs. She had a baby girl, and I occasionally baby-sat for her. She had named her daughter Melina, which I thought was an incredibly beautiful name for a little girl. I remarked upon this one time, and she said to me "yeah, I like it, and I figure when she's a little older she'll be nicknamed Mel, which isn't too girly."
Melina's mother did not fit any "girly" stereotypes. She had rennovated her house pretty much on her own; she didn't dress in typical feminine garb, and she was, of course,…
thusspakezuska | June 19, 2007For those who may be interested, I have written an addendum to the infamous "I Support Gender Equity in Principle..." post. The very ugly comments thread on that post is now closed. You'll notice you can't post comments here either.
I'm doing this for my mental health. It's either this, or all gardening and no blogging.
thusspakezuska | June 11, 2007UPDATE: I have appended some text to this post at the end. I have closed the comments on this post because they have become so unpleasant all around and I don't think further dialogue here is serving any positive purpose. If you disagree with me, I'm sorry. I'm also sorry I didn't do this a lot sooner.
I was browsing around Absinthe's blog looking for something in an old post when I happened across an entry I had missed. It seems Absinthe has taken down an older post discussing the differential treatment of two physicists - husband and wife - at Fermilab.
The post commented on an…
thusspakezuska | June 6, 2007N.B.: Nature Physics (3, 363; 2007) has an editorial on a recent American Physical Society workshop, Gender Equity: Strengthening the Physics Enterprise in Universities and National Laboratories. This post is based** on that editorial, which is behind a paywall; you can read part of it here.
So, the American Physical Society had a gender equity workshop, and all the bigwigs came - chairs of 50 major physics departments, 14 division directors of national labs, leaders from NSF and DOE. "After all, if there is to be change, it has to come from the top." Sounds good on paper. There was…
thusspakezuska | May 22, 2007I would not have believed this would be possible in 2007, and yet, here it is.
CBS is bringing to your television, this fall, a series so full of stereotypes, so dazzingly stupid, so ridiculously puerile, that it must surely offend the sensibilities of everyone in science.
I am talking about "The Big Bang Theory".
Dubious thanks to alert reader Maggie W. for letting me know about this. My life would have been happier had I been in blissful ignorance, but alas, it is my mournful duty to skewer the moronocity of things of this ilk.
Here is a quote from the show's web site:
"The Big Bang…
thusspakezuska | May 22, 2007Bora pointed me to a post at The Phineas Gage Fan Club about an undergraduate student in Sweden who has been rather severely punished by her university for appearing naked in the pages of a "lad mag".
The department demanded that the student attend psychotherapy with a member of faculty, and that she apologise in front of her entire year. They then barred the student from going on work placement (which all the other students in her year were doing), leaving her to work in the department (presumably photocopying and boiling coffee).
I have to agree with Johan that this is an expression of…
thusspakezuska | May 7, 2007A long-time reader tipped me off about a recent New York Times article poetically titled
Getting the Most Bang Out of Quarks and Gluons.
It's all about the really nifty guy-physics going on at Brookhaven National Lab and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC or "rick". Hah.)
I'm not sure what I find most annoying about this article. Is it the doofus-y physicists pretending to be Captain Kirk, Scotty, Spock et al. aboard the Starship Enterprise? (You may not be surprised to learn that there was no Lt. Uhura in the group.)
"That's Captain Kirk over there," said Dr. Trainor, pointing…
thusspakezuska | April 24, 2007I have never been a huge fan of the comic strip "Cathy". In the comic strip office world, I had Dilbert on one hand, as exemplar for engineers, and Cathy on the other hand, as the model for professional working women. Neither was particularly appealing to me. Dilbert personifies all the negative geekoid engineering stereotypes, but seems to be taken by the masses as a hipsterish anti-hero. Cathy, much of the time, seems to be a blithering idiot who is way too fixated on her appearance, the need to cram the body she doesn't love into the latest skinny-minny fashions, and the desire to eat…
thusspakezuska | February 26, 2007So, you've probably heard about this by now: the sorority at DePauw University where 23 members were asked to vacate the house because they weren't "sufficiently dedicated to recruitment". It just so happens that the cadre of insufficiently dedicated members included all the sorority's black, Korean, and Vietnamese members. It included all the members who were overweight, we are told. Seemingly, it also included a large number of women who were math and science majors as well.
...the chapter appears to have been home to a diverse community over the years, partly because it has attracted…
thusspakezuska | February 11, 2007What is it with the techie women pin-up calendar business?
First, we had the loathesome Geek Gorgeous calendar.
Then came the misbegotten IT Screen Goddess calendar.
Now Skookumchick brings us news of young women engineers at the University of Illinois who have posed, scantily clad and nearly naked in some cases, for a pinup calendar.
Here's what I had to say in the past about such calendars:
The participants think they are saying to the world, "Look, I'm smart AND sexy!"
But what they are actually saying to the world is, "Look! No matter how smart I ever am, you can count on me not to…
thusspakezuska | January 16, 2007How do you effectively encourage young girls to stick with their math, science, and computer studies in high school? How do you effectively encourage them to consider careers in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics? There's no one perfect approach; you need a full toolkit that allows you to mend all the malfunctions and rip down all the roadblocks that gender roles, peer pressures, familial or societal expectations, and poor or misguided teachers can throw at a girl.
The editors of and contributors to She's Such A Geek! thought one good tool to have in the arsenal would be an…
thusspakezuska | December 12, 2006I wonder if Rachel Brenc thinks the Iraq Study Group's report was biased. After all, of the ten members of the panel who issued the report, nine were all of one gender, with only one of the opposite gender.
Oh wait a minute, it's okay. There were nine penises on the Iraq Study Group, so bias clearly isn't an issue here.
Actually, there are two factors at play here. If the NSF report Beyond Bias and Barriers had been issued by a panel of seventeen men and one women, I am pretty sure Rachel and her ilk would still not have been happy with it. No, the fuss about the supposedly biased…
thusspakezuska | December 4, 2006The Chronicle of Higher Education's news blog has a little item on Joseph Schlessinger. You may know him as the "internationally known researcher and head of the pharmacology department at Yale University" famous for his "his work in figuring out how information flows between a cell surface and the cell -- studies credited with laying the groundwork for several treatments for cancer".
Or you may know him now as the jerk-ass who allegedly sexually harassed his secretary so frequently and so long that she eventually had to quit her job to get away from him.
The secretary, Mary Beth Garceau,…
thusspakezuska | November 21, 2006Over at Dr. Free-Ride's pad, Ken C. is most distressed that no one has attempted to debate our dear friend Rachel's serious critique of the NSF report, Beyond Bias and Barriers.
Knowing how ably Rachel dissected the work of that horribly biased panel that put together that shoddy piece of work, I nevertheless shouldered the burden of taking on a point by point rebuttal of her main claims. You can find this rebuttal over at Dr. Free-Ride's, just below Ken C.'s whining. Here's a taste (quoting myself):
Well, Rachel is a freshman, and so perhaps she has not yet had a lot of experience with…
thusspakezuska | November 17, 2006Normally I think one should be a bit gentle with the young un's, as they are still not fully formed and their thinking has not developed much complexity. They haven't had a lot of experience; you have to give them time to grow into understanding.
But if they will go about writing screeds for rightwing publications, all bets are off.
Over at the Cornell American Online, Rachel Brenc, a first-year student in engineering - oops, I mean, freshman - has written a little piece that ought to be titled Why There's Nothing Wrong With White Male Domination Of Every Institution In Our Society As…