in the news
skookumchick | November 3, 2008A colleague emailed me notice of an article published 11/1 in the Columbus Dispatch, titled "OSU wants more female scientists." The first part of the article reads:A new Ohio State University program that aims to help female professors advance in the sciences would lead to discrimination and quotas, the president of a scholars' group says.
"What will prevent Ohio State officials from hiring members of the preferred groups who are less qualified than other applicants because of cronyism?" said George W. Dent Jr., president of the Ohio Association of Scholars.
"If you have a quota to fill, you…
skookumchick | October 17, 2008Did you know the Association for Women in Science and the Society for Women Engineers asked both presidential campaigns for responses to questions about science and engineering and women's roles in each. Download the pdf here to see the questions and the candidates responses. Read them through and be edified. (I tried to copy and paste them here, but it turned into a formatting nightmare - even all the spaces were screwed up...)
What do you think of their responses?
skookumchick | August 4, 2008Apparently the blogosphere is abuzz with McCain's recent disclosure that he has to force himself to use a computer, that the closest he comes to using email is his staffers showing him email, and that his wife makes all the online reservations when they go to the movies (source NYT). This is in stark contrast with Obama who, on top of looking super-presidential and cool, is apparently a whizz with the technotoys, and even had his own podcast since early days of his senatehood.
In the NYT piece, an interesting comment was posed by both the McCain campaign and a blogger associated with the…
sciencewoman | July 31, 2008I am an inveterate and unapologetic listener of NPR. I love to feel like I am getting something useful out of being stuck in traffic and I find their reporting to generally be much better and more in-depth than that of the print media. However, this week, All Things Considered's reporting has really irritated me. Not just because they almost exclusively focus on the horse-race aspects of the presidential race, but because they've been doing a pretty poor job of reporting their statistics in a correct and understandable way.
First the confusing example, from yesterday's story about McCain and…
sciencewoman | July 17, 2008John Tierney had a piece in Tuesday's New York Times on "A new frontier for Title IX: Science." Anyone who's read anything by Tierney before knows to expect anti-woman idiocy, but the Times dignified his piece by putting it not in the opinion section, but in the science section. And that poor editorial decision makes the piece worth responding too.
If you haven't yet read the article, here's how Tierney starts out:
The members of Congress and women's groups who have pushed for science to be "Title Nined" say there is evidence that women face discrimination in certain sciences, but the quality…