sexism
denialism | July 8, 2008Complementing Pal's essay on Gardasil yesterday is our buddy la Pobre Habladora guest blogging on Feministe.
Which, I think, brings us to a new angle on anti-vax denialism because as Pal mentions, the motivations behind harping on Gardasil are different than the usual nonsense. Gardasil, to everyone's dismay, has become intertwined with sexual politics in this country. As the only vaccine that has been identified as preventing a sexually-transmitted disease (the HepB vaccine managed to avoid this, not to mention an association with IV-drug use) there has been a clear impetus among the anti-…
grrlscientist | July 8, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, female scientists, science publishing, double-blind review, single-blind review, cultural observation, gender bias, sexism, feminism
A microbiologist at work.
Image: East Bay AWIS.
A few months ago, a controversy occurred in the blogosphere regarding whether scientific papers whose first author is female are discriminated against during the peer-review process, and the suggestion was to institute double-blind peer review as a way to mitigate this possibility. "Double-blinding" as this is sometimes referred to, is a process where a manuscript that has been…
denialism | June 20, 2008Surprisingly, it's not due to the horribly misguided abstinence education nonsense. In fact, I can't even begin to wrap my mind around this one.
As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies--more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there's been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town.…
sb admin | April 13, 2008Think about your own experiences---you're at a party or a restaurant, and someone you're with says something obviously racist. You cringe, but given the setting, you can't decide how to react; after a pause, you probably decide to say something. Now imagine you're at meeting for work, and a senior partner says something racist. You want to say something, and you even know that under some circumstances there are laws behind you, but you don't want to get branded a trouble maker and risk subtle (or not-so-subtle) discrimination.
Now imagine you are sitting in the doctors' lounge, and a…
goodmath | March 12, 2008 After yesterday's post about the great women of computer science, I noticed my SciBling MarkH over at the Denialism blog had discovered Vox Day and his latest burst of stupidity, in which he alleges that the greatest threat to science is.... women. Because, you see, women are all stupid.
The bizarre propositions of equalitarianism always sound harmless and amusing at first because they are so absurd. What the rational observer often fails to understand, however, is that these propositions don't sound the least bit absurd to the equalitarian proponent because the average equalitarian is…
denialism | March 11, 2008I love a crank that you only have to quote to utterly humiliate. From the guy who brought the logic of the Third Reich to bear on the immigration issue we have this thoughtful analysis of the real threat to science:
As I have demonstrated in "The Irrational Atheist," religion is not a threat to any aspect of science: It does not threaten the knowledge base, it does not threaten the method and it does not threaten the profession. It never has.
But this is not to say there is not a genuine threat to all three aspects of science today. Unsurprisingly, it comes from the same force that is the…
greengabbro | February 20, 2008
The buzz in the geoblogosphere this week has been about an article in Nature Geoscience on the status of women in the academic earth sciences. I meant to review it here, but haven't had the oomph. Instead, you should join the discussion at All My Faults are Stress-Related, Ten Million Years of Solitude, and The Dynamic Earth. One point that hasn't been discussed much yet is that graduate school in the earth sciences is actually freakishly egalitarian - unlike other fields, we do not see large-scale gender fractionation between the master's and Ph.D. As a Ph.D. noncompleter I was…
grrlscientist | February 12, 2008tags: James Watson, racism, sexism, genetic engineering, seed media group, scienceblogs, Adam Bly
James Watson, 1962 Nobel Prize winner
for co-discovering the structure of DNA along with
Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins.
Yesterday, Adam Bly, founder, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Seed Media Group, was interviewed by Carol Goar for an editorial about the Canadian government's dismissal of its national science adviser, Arthur Carty.
"Science is driving our global culture unlike ever before," Bly is cited as saying. "Now is not the time to send a signal -- domestically and internationally --…
greengabbro | February 12, 2008You know, when you join a new organization, you don't typically scan the board of directors looking for people who have previously been publicly identified as over-the-line bigots no reasonable person should associate with ever. Or at least I don't. I certainly didn't when I signed on as a minion for ScienceBlogs.
So I was surprised to learn that the over-the-line racist sexist bigot biologist Jim Watson is still on the Seed Media board.
Of course, if I refused to work for anyone who associated with what I consider to be unacceptable racism or sexism, I would never have a job ever again. I…
grrlscientist | January 21, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, Female Scientists, science publishing, science blogging, gender bias, sexism, feminism
A microbiologist at work.
Image: East Bay AWIS.
In the wake of the Science Blogging Conference in North Carolina, which I was unable to attend due to financial reasons, The Scientist's blog published a piece today that asks "Do Women Blog About Science?" This article was written partially in response to the kerfuffle that was triggered last year after The Scientist asked what were their readers' favorite life science blogs. Several women, including me, noticed that they only…
grrlscientist | October 18, 2007I have been following this furor over Nobel laureate Jim Watson's comments about blacks, women and homosexuals and I am astonished that he would walk around, openly spouting such stupid and irrational prejudices when his beliefs are easily disproven scientifically! Has he read anything in the scientific literature that has been published since he won his Nobel in 1962? I would guess not, since he is woefully and inexcusably ignorant.
In view of his fresh onslaught of unabashed racism, sexism and homophobia (this isn't the first time he has openly blasted anyone who is not a priviledged white…