gender issues
bioephemera | January 11, 2009
"I Want You To Want Me"
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar
commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art for their "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition
Mining data from online dating profiles, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar have created a romantic, bittersweet peek into the human psyche. This video tour of the "I Want You to Want Me" installation ends on an up note - apparently "intelligence" is the top turn-on for online daters! Still, the sight of all those balloons bumping randomly past each other in the sky serves as a reminder that finding love anywhere, online or in meatspace, is a total…
edyong | December 23, 2008Three years ago, Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard University, claimed that genetic differences between the sexes led to a "different availability of aptitude at the high end". His widely derided led to his dismissal, but is views are by no means uncommon. In the same year, Paul Irwing and Richard Lynn conducted a review of existing studies on sex differences in intelligence and concluded:
"Different proportions of men and women with high IQs... may go some way to explaining the greater numbers of men achieving distinctions of various kinds for which a high IQ is required, such…
bioephemera | November 30, 2008
"Please Hug Me"
artist: J. Keeler, 1987
Today is the 20th annual World AIDS Day. I can still remember when I first learned about AIDS, in the late eighties - it was an extremely scary and mysterious thing that the media seemed very uncomfortable covering. No one I knew was talking about it openly - family, friends, or teachers. That's why posters like this were so important.
AIDS awareness advertisements represent a history of creative and controversial images - largely because of their sometimes explicit* sexual content, but also because of the stigmas attached to STDs, casual sex, and…
bioephemera | November 20, 2008Chesterfields ad, 1952
Today, November 20, is the American Cancer Society's 33rd Great American Smokeout. Now, be honest: did you even know?
The Smokeout doesn't seem to get as much attention as it used to, perhaps because the link between cigarette smoke and cancer is no longer surprising or controversial. After decades of anti-tobacco campaigns hammering the research home, no media-conscious American could plausibly believe that cigarettes are actually good for his or her health. Yet this is a sea change from attitudes in the first half of the 20th century, when cigarettes' health benefits…
bioephemera | November 3, 2008In the current New Yorker, Margaret Talbot summarizes the gaping chasm in attitudes toward teenage sex in Red and Blue America:
Social liberals in the country's "blue states" tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter's pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in "red states" generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn't choose to have an…
bioephemera | August 18, 2008Jen Ouellette takes lethal aim at the myth of the sexless girl-geek in this post, which made me want to pump my fist and cheer and go out dancing in a sexy dress and look in a microscope and write a blog post all at the same time:
The mistake many people make, however, is to over-compensate too far in the other direction, wherein anything remotely "girly" is somehow exerting undue pressure on young girls, with no thought to the possibility that maybe some girls genuinely like this stuff. Maybe this is part of who they are. Maybe they also like science and math. Ergo, we are putting a whole…
grrlscientist | November 9, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, women in science, feminism, gender disparity, academia, career
Image: East Bay AWIS.
An article was published in today's issue of Science that explores the reasons that female scientists are not achieving that elusive Principle Investigator (PI) status that is generally thought to be the epitome of success in academe. In short, this article argues that family responsibilities hold women back; women sacrifice their own career aspirations to care for children or elderly parents, and they also are more likely to sacrifice their career in favor of their spouse's…
grrlscientist | September 21, 2007tags: gender issues, gender disparity, blogosphere, science blogs, life science blogs
PZ asked his students these questions on an exam that he was recently writing;
14. Hey! Have you noticed the lack of women scientists so far? Briefly speculate about why they're missing.
15 (2 pts extra credit). Name a female scientist of any era.
So .. in addition to those questions, I pose these questions for you regarding female scientists;
Can you name any? Who?
Who is the first woman scientist who comes to mind?
Do you have a "favorite" woman scientist?
My answers to these additional questions are…
grrlscientist | September 20, 2007tags: gender issues, gender disparity, blogosphere, science blogs, life science blogs
Image: Anemi
I have been thinking more about TheScientist's recent online article, "Vote for your favorite life science blogs", where they asked this same question of seven of the "top" life science bloggers -- all of whom just so happened to be men. It reminded me of Declan Butler's Nature article that was published approximately two years ago, where he listed the "top" science blogs using some rather ambiguous standards that were inconsistently applied for defining precisely what is a science blog ..…
scientificactivist | April 20, 2007On Wednesday, when the Supreme Court upheld a federal ban on "partial-birth abortions" in its 5-4 decision on Gonzalez v. Carhart, it dealt a potentially huge setback to US reproductive freedoms. Although intact dilation and extraction makes up only a small subset of all abortions, this ruling is significant in that it explicitly does not allow for exceptions when the mother's health is at risk. The decision is also notable in its lack of adherence to Court precedence, its lack of reliance on solid legal reasoning, and its ignorance of medical opinion. Much can and should be written about…