Sex Discrimination
thusspakezuska | November 1, 2007David Perlmutter, professor and associate dean for graduate studies and research in the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas, has a column in the November 2 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education on knowing when to keep a secret. Perlmutter offers up some good advice about managing one's career by knowing when to hold one's tongue, or even by avoiding hearing the secret someone else is dying to share. He suggests you fend off the would-be gossipers by saying, "I think I know what you are going to tell me, and it's really none of…
thusspakezuska | September 27, 2007Saw this over at The Chem Blog. Couldn't help offering my own spin on it. Chem Blog needs some serious shoe-puking.
I recommend you read the original, then my version. It will be more fun that way.
Oh god that is so freaking depressing isn't it? Reminds me of a sad story from when I was in grad school. Seems there was a boy with good looking transcripts but about equivalent to those of a girl in the program so they gave a hearty fellowship to the boy because, as you may have guessed, he's got a Y chromosome and this advantage must be exacerbated with fellowships, grants and pats on…
thusspakezuska | September 12, 2007So I'm skimming along in Google Reader, thinking it's the year 2007, when whoa! I happen upon this post by Female Science Professor. Did he actually call her "science lady"? WTF? What millennium are we living in?
And this is the kind of response you get from the authorities when you are calling about a long-standing, well-documented problem of stalking/harassment. But hey, she wasn't actually physically assaulted by the stalker, so what's the big deal, right? Plus, she was asking for it.
What if she was physically assaulted and was actually unable to ask for it at the time - i.e…
thusspakezuska | September 11, 2007Young Female Scientist asks her readers to rank their undergraduate and graduate institutions on a scale of 1 to 10, "10 being the most egalitarian and synergistic even with conflicting opinions from strong personality types (probably doesn't exist), 1 being the most sexist, demeaning, lawsuit-deserving place in the world". She wants people to name names - not their own, but that of their institutions.
In the four comments she got, nobody named names.
Apparently people - women? - do not feel safe enough to call out their departments and institutions on their sexism. What if someone…
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 | August 16, 2007Nothing gets by Absinthe's diligence.
Inspired by my recent post regarding women's washrooms, Absinthe writes to tell me:
Not having enough washrooms for women violates Title IX. who knew??? Check this out.
Absinthe suggests we study the ratio of womens' to mens' rooms in the top 50 physics, engineering, chemistry, and other science departments. It would certainly be interesting to see the results of such a survey.
thusspakezuska | July 25, 2007From the Chronicle of Higher Education today:
A California state senator grilled Charles B. Reed, chancellor of the California State University system, and John D. Welty, president of its Fresno campus, on their commitment to gender equity in athletics at a special hearing here on Tuesday.
The senator is somewhat peeved about two recent settlements - one for $5.85 million to former women's volleyball coach Linda Vivas, and another for $3.5-million with a former women's swimming coach and assistant athletics director. After awhile, the millions start to add up, and people notice. You know,…
thusspakezuska | July 17, 2007From the Chronicle of Higher Education today:
Women who play sports in high school are more likely to earn a college degree than women who do not, according to a new study by Mikaela J. Dufur, an assistant professor of sociology at Brigham Young University, and Kelly P. Troutman, an adjunct instructor of anthropology and sociology at West Chester University of Pennsylvania...The findings..."suggest a societal benefit to female sport participation in the form of increased educational attainment," they say. Therefore, they argue, "rather than looking for ways to excuse schools from Title IX…
thusspakezuska | July 17, 2007The Chronicle of Higher Education reports
California legislators plan to look into whether there is widespread gender bias in the California State University system
following a lawsuit that resulted in a multi-million dollar award to Cal State-Fresno's former women's volleyball coach.
State Sen. Don Perata, a Democrat and chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, said lawmakers were alarmed by the cost of the case to taxpayers, and also want to find out whether Cal State had turned a blind eye to gender discrimination elsewhere in the system, the AP reported...Fresno State said it would…
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, 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 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 | May 4, 2007The Chronicle of Higher Education daily update reports on this year's inductees to the National Academy of Sciences. A total of 72 members and 18 foreign associates elected this year - and guess what, they managed to find 9 worthy women. Yes, NINE.
Is that not amazing?
But fear not, friends. We are told:
The number of women inducted is nearly half the record 19 elected in 2005 (The Chronicle, May 4, 2005). Nevertheless, the percentage of all members who are women has steadily grown to reach about 10 percent this year, an all-time high. The proportion should continue to grow as more…
thusspakezuska | April 6, 2007Bora at A Blog Around the Clock alerted me to an article in Science Daily titled Power And Sexual Harassment -- Men And Women See Things Differently.
Issues of power, workplace culture and the interpretation of verbal and non-verbal communication associated with sexual harassment were the focus of a study by Debbie Dougherty, assistant professor of communication in the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Working with a large healthcare organization in the Midwest, Dougherty examined the question: why does sexual harassment occur?
Dougherty's findings show…
thusspakezuska | February 22, 2007Absinthe has asked me to do a mirror post of her post on this issue. So, here it is.
Several months ago I told you about the Kay Weber v Fremilab lawsuit in my post Class action lawsuits. If you read the link to her federal court Complaint contained in that post, you will see that she lived through a decade of appalling sexual harassment and even more appalling retaliation when she complained to the lab (she was successively demoted over the course of a decade from being one of the top women at the lab to eventually working under the supervision of a tech...she was ultimately fired…
thusspakezuska | February 12, 2007This is the second of three discussion posts for Week 1 of Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science. You can find all posts for this course by going to the archives and clicking on "Joy of Science" under in the Category section.
This post deals with the readings by Silverman and by Wenneras & Wold, as well as the NSF report "Beyond Bias and Barriers".
These readings deal with two major issues that dog women throughout their careers in science and engineering: the wage gap and gender bias in peer review. Lest you think the data in the Silverman piece are out of date, consider the…
thusspakezuska | December 6, 2006The latest installment in the X-Gals series is out: Life As A Mother-Scientist. Subtitle: The X-Gals, a group of nine female biologists, see a direct correlation between their productivity and their child care.
Note that last phrase: the link is not between productivity and having children. It's between productivity and child care. Access to it, quality of available child care, sudden unpredictable collapse of previously arranged child care, difficulty of obtaining child care for very young infants or sick children, and so on. When good child care arrangements are in place,…