Why There Are No Women in Science
thusspakezuska | December 4, 2006Occasionally one of my (usually male) readers will take me to task for what he considers to be my unwarranted angry - dare I say, strident? - tone of voice. Can I not be more polite? More reasonable? Would I not catch more flies with honey? Only speak sweet reason, dear crazy bitch Zuska, they plead, and we will assuredly attend to the substance of your message. But not while you rant and rave so. No indeed. That can only turn us off.
Well, as someone I knew once said, I don't want to catch flies. I want to kill them.
I told the story of the origins of the "Puke On His Shoes"…
thusspakezuska | November 21, 2006Over at Dr. Free-Ride's pad, Ken C. is most distressed that no one has attempted to debate our dear friend Rachel's serious critique of the NSF report, Beyond Bias and Barriers.
Knowing how ably Rachel dissected the work of that horribly biased panel that put together that shoddy piece of work, I nevertheless shouldered the burden of taking on a point by point rebuttal of her main claims. You can find this rebuttal over at Dr. Free-Ride's, just below Ken C.'s whining. Here's a taste (quoting myself):
Well, Rachel is a freshman, and so perhaps she has not yet had a lot of experience with…
thusspakezuska | November 21, 2006Thanks to Dr. Free-Ride of Adventures in Ethics and Science for alerting me to this most wonderful post. Transient Reporter has provided a most delicious translation of one of Toadygawa's emails to Alla Karpova. It is too, too good to pass up. Here's the intro:
From: Susumu Tonegawa
Sent: Thursday, May 11, 2006 7:09 PM
To: Karpova, Alla
Subject: CONFIDENTIAL
Dear Alla,
I enjoyed talking with you enormously.
So who the hell are you, exactly?
Although I do have a reservation about the use of the MIST technology as the primary approach for studying circuit mechanisms underlying the…
thusspakezuska | November 21, 2006Jokerine wrote in respone to Let Her Eat the Oppressor's Cake:
had a discussion in my group today about affirmative action. One of the guys comented that if we promoted women in male fields soon all groups on the fringes of society would ask for prefferential treatment. I couldn't figure out what was bothering me for a while, but wait a minute since when are women a fringe group. And this from a man that considers himself liberal and progressive. Poor Rachel, one day her eyes will open and she will see how much worse she is off as a woman. I'll be there for her to come crying to.
No indeedy,…
thusspakezuska | November 20, 2006Following up on my entry on Joanna Russ's book, How to Suppress Women's Writing, and its application to women in science and engineering...
In discussing "prohibitions", Russ notes"
First of all, it's important to realize that the absence of formal prohibitions against committing art [or science] does not preclude the presence of powerful, informal ones.
These include poverty and lack of leisure, the latter arising from overwhelming duties to family and home. Even our heroines had to overcome this latter prohibition:
Marie Curie's biographer, her daughter Eve, describes her mother's…
thusspakezuska | November 20, 2006Joanna Russ wrote a wonderful book in 1983 called How to Suppress Women's Writing. (You can purchase it on the internet here or at your local bookseller or at amazon.) Sadly, you could read that book today and apply its insights directly to science and engineering.
So, with an acknowledgement to Joanna Russ:
She didn't do science. (But if it's clear she did the deed...)
She did science, but she shouldn't have. (It's science with a political agenda, it's actually masculine thinking.)
She did science, but look what she researched. (Technology of household equipment, domestic…
thusspakezuska | November 20, 2006Toadygawa is history! At least at Picower. The Chronicle's news blog reports that Susumu Tonegawa is stepping down as head of Picower after an university investigation found he "behaved inappropriately when he tried to discourage a young female scholar from accepting a job offer from MIT". Sadly, the university declined to discipline anyone and we are told Toadygawa is stepping down on his own. I like to think he was strong-armed into stepping down. I am pretty sure he didn't just up and do it out of the goodness of his heart because of his concern for the larger MIT community. Or, as…
thusspakezuska | November 15, 2006It's been a migrainey sort of week here at Chez Zuska, so in lieu of something new at the moment, I'm giving you a "best of Zuska" from the old blog site. By coincidence, it's also trash and recycling night here in my hometown. Read and decide for yourself.
Shake Off The Dust Under Your Feet
And as a follow-up to my last post, take a gander at what Female Science Professor has to say:
At my university, there has never been a woman department chair in science, engineering, or math in the entire history of the university. A dean recently told me that it will probably be another decade or so…
thusspakezuska | November 8, 2006I started this as a reply to a comment by Chris on my post Why Are All The White Men Sitting Together In The Other Conference Rooms? but it became a post of its own. Chris wrote:
As someone who's attended quite a few engineering conferences, I find that sessions about the profession/discipline tend not to be very well attended, and not representative of the meeting attendees as a whole. For instance, sessions on engineering education tend to attract only a small fraction of the attendees that come to sessions about using steel reinforced concrete in bridge design or retroreflectivity in…
thusspakezuska | October 31, 2006So I'm at a conference where the majority of attendees are white males. Well, after all, it is an engineering conference. Anyway, given the demographics, do you expect to walk into any particular parallel session and find that there are only two, three, maybe five white males, and the remaining 25 to 30 session attendees are comprised of ten or 12 white females and the rest minority women and men?
Where have all the white men gone? Long time passing.
The easiest way to clean all the white males out of your parallel session is to title it "Diversity" and to schedule talks on:
The…
thusspakezuska | October 30, 2006So I'm at the Frontiers in Education conference, and there's so much good stuff going on my brain is on overload. Plus, there are other people here who call themselves feminist engineers! It was worth the price of admission just to be in their company. And there are men who are giving papers talking about gender! White male engineers talking about race! Where has this conference been all my life?!?!?! Seriously, I can't believe I never went to this conference before. It totally rocks.
Also I met Bill Scher, blogger at Liberal Oasis, and author of Wait! Don't Move to Canada! A Stay…
thusspakezuska | October 25, 2006Well, I'll never work in academia again after those last two posts.
I suppose if my migraines ever get under control I can always go back to industry. Pharma is always desperate for experienced medical writers and they pay better than academia anyway. Plus the hours are better. Let's just hope pharma doesn't give a crap about my blog.
Which brings me to the topic of this post. Why do you think that I am able to rant so freely, express the truth so bluntly, expose morons to the blinding light of revelation with impunity, all under my real name? It's because I have no job. And I'm not…
thusspakezuska | October 25, 2006As I promised, here is the email I received from President Lewis Duncan of Rollins College after I wrote a blog post on his comments on the Karpova-Tonegawa affair. My commentary on his email is in brackets and italicized. Email and my commentary after the jump.
Dear Ms. Frank, [sic]
I take strong exception to your misleading interpretation and extrapolation of my quote in the Boston Globe.
How disappointing that a fellow scientist would be so presumptuous in her perspectives. [This is lame.
'You're a scientist, so you're supposed to be rational, and you aren't being rational, so are…
thusspakezuska | October 24, 2006Back in early August, I wrote about the Karpova-Tonegawa controversy at MIT, and about Rollins College president Lewis Duncan's comments on the topic in the Boston Globe.
More on the Karpova-Toadygawa story. This may be the best part of all. Because you see, Zuskateers, it isn't just Toadygawa who's had his true colors exposed. Consider this quote from the Boston Globe:
If the accusations are deemed true, [MIT president] Hockfield will face the task of standing up to one of MIT's greatest luminaries, someone who brings in tens of millions of dollars of research funding. "This may…
thusspakezuska | October 13, 2006Dr. Shellie has a post on the National Academies report and the ensuing discussion on Inside Higher Ed. Dr. Shellie says:
I am increasingly frustrated with the issue of discrimination against women in academia. Rhetorically, women are being put in the position of having to prove that discrimination exists, against the claims of their opponents, who claim that the gender ratio in science is in fact due to other factors (biology, interests, etc.).
I don't like the way this debate is framed. It puts women in a weak position, to argue the evidence for their own poor treatment.
And anyway, I…
thusspakezuska | September 18, 2006This seems as good a time as any to reprint this entry from my blog's previous incarnation. The original title was "Zuska Recommends a Dose of Absinthe".
After some preliminary stuff introducing Absinthe's blog and referring to the then-current Ben Barrres news story (Ben is a neurobiologist who used to be Barbara Barres, and thus has some unique insights on the situation of women in science), the entry deconstructs Fermilab's discourse in a propaganda rag. Fermilab presents the story of Elizabeth Freeland, who overcame Fermilab's considerable barriers to restart her physics career, as if…
thusspakezuska | September 18, 2006Tim left this comment over at Uncertain Principles on Chad's post The Pipeline Problem:
I thought the data was pretty clear about this: past high school, the [physics] pipeline is no more leaky for women than it is for men...here's the
Report:
Read it for yourselves.
Examination of the academic "pipeline" reveals that women disproportionately leave physics between taking it in high school and earning a bachelor's degree. While almost half of high school physics students are girls, less that one-fourth of bachelor's degrees in physics are earned by women. After this initial "leak" in the…
thusspakezuska | September 15, 2006Earlier this summer, a famous cheesesteak purveyor here in Philadelphia put up a sign in his establishment that read "This is America: When Ordering, Speak English", thus touching off a controversy that raged for weeks. Owner Joey Vento was eventually served with a complaint claiming he was in violation of two sections of the city's anti-discrimination laws.
Vento's sign was just one manifestation of the xenophobia sweeping the nation these days, politely euphemized as "immigration controversy". It's also a stark illustration of how the dominant group (in this case, moneyed Republican…
thusspakezuska | September 11, 2006I just wanna hurl chunks right now at fellow Sb'er Chad, who writes Uncertain Principles. Chad wrote this foolish entry about the so-called pipeline problem of women in physics. Which just goes to show that even an advanced degree in physics is no guarantee you won't have your head up your ass now and then.
The gist of Chad's post seems to be that, since he is a nice guy, it is awfully unfair of unnamed personnages to go about bashing physics profs for their bad behavior vis-a-vis women, especially since most of his colleagues on the faculty are also nice guys. Here's the whiny end of…
thusspakezuska | September 6, 2006So, what would be an example of someone creating a hostile environment in the workplace or educational setting?
An example of "frequent, non-trivial acts of a sexual nature" might be, oh, say repeatedly raping your lab assistant nearly 80 times. The rapist in this case was R. Igor Gamow, "a prominent inventor and chemical engineer who was fired by the [University of Colorado] in 2004 for 'moral turpitude.' " The multiple rapes took place between 1995 and 1998. (See The Chronicle of Higher Education daily news, May 5, 2006.)
Or, as Kay Weber alleges in Weber v. Fermi National Accelerator…