gender
jane | March 23, 2009Just a friendly reminder that tomorrow, March 24, is Ada Lovelace Day, a day devoted to highlighting women in technology. Get your posts together! (Even if you didn't sign the pledge, please join in on the fun!) Details on how to post and tag are here.
I am so excited about my own post---the woman I am posting about totally rocks, and I can't wait to introduce you to her and her work.
Also, while we are on the subject of reminders: If you're not familiar with fellow scibling Isis the Scientist....well, why the hell aren't you reading her already? Anyway, you definitely want to click…
bioephemera | March 18, 2009
Via Bora's blog, a delightfully cheesy1955 filmstrip about why science education is more important than anything else - even fishing. It starts out slow, but this Sputnik-era treasure turns into a veritable propagandafest about how science literacy is a civic duty. Plus, it raises vital questions like "Why do these kids have weird pseudo-Southern accents even though their parents don't?" and "How can science help Betty 'hook some guy'?"
Remember, women need to know as much about science as some men do! Are you going to be ready?
(Look how bored Betty looks by the end.)
Provenance:…
sb admin | March 12, 2009Um, hi. Apparently I've been gone for a while. Yeah. Sorry about that. Life's been a bit crazy around here lately, and I feel like I'm barely keeping my head above water. I'm not sleeping. I'm not taking care of myself. I'm sick. I'm stressed to the gills. I have way too much to do. I feel like I work all the damn time. Hmmm, maybe that's because I *do* work all the damn time.
In addition to not having time to breathe blog, I haven't really been in the headspace to blog. I have a ton of stuff on my mind, but I'm not sure how to blog it. It's all about tenure, of course: the…
thusspakezuska | March 1, 2009Well, February has come and gone, Black History Month is over for another year, and we've had the first round of the Diversity in Science carnival. I am sure some of you who blog may have thought about contributing to this carnival but didn't for a variety of reasons. Maybe, like me, you had family issues and/or health issues going on; I almost didn't make it to contribute to the carnival myself. Maybe your job was making you crazy. Or maybe you thought to yourself, "I am not an expert on diversity. I don't want to offend anyone. I don't really know how to go about writing on this topic…
sb admin | February 25, 2009I'm supervising a few independent studies this year, with groups of students working on fairly large and fairly fuzzily-defined design projects. These groups couldn't be more different from each other in terms of the way they act as a group, act as individuals, and interact with me. It's got me thinking a lot lately about group dynamics among students and the strong influences that certain individuals have over the behavior of the entire group.
One of the groups is highly functional---on the surface. The students all get along really well with each other and appear to complement each other…
gregladen | February 18, 2009Nature, the publishing group, not the Mother, has taken Darwin's 200th as an opportunity to play the race card (which always sells copy) and went ahead and published two opposing views on this question: "Should scientists study race and IQ?
The answers are Yes, argued by Stephen Cici and Wendy Williams of the Dept of Human Development at Cornell, and No, argued by Steven Rose, a neuroscientist at Open University.
I would like to weigh in.
The real answer, as is so often the case, is "You dumbass, what kind of question is that? Think about it further and rephrase the question!"
But I don't…
jane | January 31, 2009I'd really like a do-over on this week. This was probably the least productive, worst week I've had in a long, long time. It started with this lovely incident, and went downhill from there. Astute readers may recall that I really couldn't afford any distractions this week, so the fact that I basically did just the bare minimum to not get me fired really was not my best career move.
So instead of making progress on my frighteningly long to-do list, I've been:
dealing with a backache that won't go away, no matter how many tried-and-true yoga stretches I do
feeling intermittently like I am…
jane | January 26, 2009Long time readers of my old blog may remember that earlier in my career at my institution, I was the recipient of a number of harassing phone calls. And that the resolution of these calls was largely unsatisfying. But it's been three years since the last one, and so I thought that maybe that was it, that I could start to relax.
Ha.
I got yet another one this weekend. Same modus operandi as usual. This one, at least, didn't mention me by name, but it definitely sounds as if it was targeted at me.
There is one key difference this time: I have the support of my colleagues. My chair…
jane | January 7, 2009I just found out about this very cool idea, a sort of a call to arms to address those old, tired statements "where are the women in tech? why aren't there any women in tech? there are no women in tech! there are no women tech pioneers/innovators/role models because women don't like tech/are not genetically predisposed to be good at tech/can't hack it in our little boys' world".....sorry, got a bit carried away there. Anyway. I give you: Ada Lovelace Day.
From the pledge site:
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women's…
greengabbro | January 6, 2009One of my New Year's blogolutions was to clear out my to-blog folder, and bring closure to my unfinished drafts by simply posting them as-is. This is one of those drafts. Disorganized paragraphs, unfinished sentences, and general incoherence enhance the natural character and beauty of a half-written blog post and should not be considered flaws or defects.
Draft date: June 24, 2008
The women-in-science-osphere has been trying to figure out what to make of this Newsweek article about "Nerdettes", female engineering majors who make a point of displaying gender-normative behaviors like makeup.…
amillikan | December 30, 2008It's not merely a theory that women are far outnumbered by men in the world of science—it's common knowledge. But opinions vastly differ on what should be done to change the status quo. Recently, ScienceBlogger Dr. Isis sparked a series of discussions eliciting descriptions of what some of the ScienceBloggers' feminist revolutions would look like and what kind of science-doing utopias would result.
amillikan | December 26, 2008While attempts to explain the disproportionate number of women in math and science have resulted in the conclusion that women are innately inferior to men in these areas, the methodology has often—if not always—been flawed. By analyzing chess players to explain the lack of female grandmasters, one study found the lack is mostly attributable to nonparticipation, not skill. "Increase female representation in this game and you would probably see many more prodigies rising to the fore," wrote ScienceBlogger Ed Yong from Not Exactly Rocket Science.
jane | October 4, 2008That's the best way to describe how I feel right now: it was a whirlwind trip to GHC (did it seem to anyone else like the schedule was just CRAMMED FULL this year?), and I'm mentally and physically exhausted. I'm sure I'll have more posts in subsequent days about more specific stuff that came out of the conference (including some thoughts on a question posed by this person), but for now, here are my quick summary thoughts on the conference.
The blogger meetup did in fact happen (even though apparently lots of people decided to wear brown skirts and mill around the appointed meeting spot at…
jane | September 24, 2008As I may have mentioned, oh, once or twice or 20 times, I'll be at the Grace Hopper Conference this year. I'm still trying to figure out my schedule and such while there, but I'd love to try and meet up with fellow bloggers and readers, if we could possibly pull such a thing off. So, if you're going and would like to try and meet up, leave a comment! If there's enough interest, I'll do another post where we can figure out times and dates and all that fun stuff.
(and please, keep the comments and thoughts coming on the previous post---great discussion there so far!)
greengabbro | September 24, 2008Welcome to the 65th biweekly showcase of the feminist blogosphere! Here's just a taste of what's inside:
Owning privilege is not about feeling ashamed, it is about acknowledging the benefits that one receives without having to work for them.
And now today an excited colleague announced that he had just discovered this totally new concept on the internet: white privilege! Even though I've been teaching the idea for over a decade, and it's even discussed in our textbook, it was news to him.
Not a lesbian, not homosexual, but 'gay' with such venom I swear her eyes turned red, smoke came charging…
greengabbro | August 8, 2008Gentle Reader, how long do I have to go without blogging before you start sending me solicitous letters of concern for my health, my Internet connection, and the distribution of my assets after death, huh???
I've got a backlog of stuff to write about, which summer lassitude will mostly doom to obscurity... but here are a few of the gender and science things:
Someone's started a geek feminism wiki. The entries are still pretty sketchy - the "women in science" article is just an empty link - but what a great concept!
I've always assumed that the reason no one has ever marketed a male hormonal…
purepedantry | July 31, 2008Sorry for the light blogging everyone. It has been a busy, busy week.
Some of you may have caught Janet Hyde's latest paper looking at data from the No Child Left Behind Act and math performance in the US. Under the No Child Left Behind Act, states are required to test children for a variety of skills on a yearly basis. The paper looked at math performance across grade-level broken down by gender for 10 states from these tests.
Here is the key graph:
The data includes a measure of effect size called Cohen's d (I discussed it here) and a measure called the variance ratio (VR -- which is…
purepedantry | July 7, 2008I often rant about bad coverage of the psychology of sex differences, so it is always satisfying to see an article that really has their facts straight.
Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon, writing in Slate, have an excellent article reviewing Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain and Susan Pinker's The Sexual Paradox. They take both authors to task for selective use of the literature, using evidence that is dated, and for ignoring the complexity of the subject.
The bottom line from the science should really be this: Some differences between the minds of men and women exist. But in most areas,…
purepedantry | July 1, 2008New York Magazine has an interesting article about fertility in Europe. Most European countries have a huge fertility problem. Since they have gone through the demographic transition, their populations are actually declining. Many do not have the relatively liberal immigration policies of the US -- which would help because immigrants have more children. (I didn't think that I would ever call the US policies liberal.) They are getting in a financial crunch because many have relatively generous social service programs, and you have a dwindling number of workers paying for an increasing…
purepedantry | June 4, 2008Related to the question of why there is a gap between the genders in math and the sciences is whether there are possible means of remedy. With respect to possible remedies it is often a good idea to look internationally at which countries don't have this problem -- to see what they are doing right.
Guiso et al. used data from the 2003 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which surveyed 15-year-old students from 40 countries who took identical tests in mathematics and reading. They compared this data with measures of the gender equity in these countries.
One such measure is…