Hello, dear readers...if there are any of you left...I've been away for a week taking care of mom, plus the usual migraine breaks...back home now, and hoping to get back in the blogging groove asap.
Meanwhile, Physioprof is off guest-blogging at Feministe for two weeks and you absolutely have to read his deconstruction of a really atrocious piece of reporting in the New York Times about Title IX and science, Teh Ladeez Jus Don Liek Teh Scienz. Warning: the quotes from the NYT will make your teeth hurt.
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It was a busy weekend here - figuring out whether we were moving, my sister was visting, other friends were visiting, we hit the local County Fair, worked in the garden, you know, life. So until just now, I hadn't paid any attention to the empty meanderings about science blogs in the Times…
Zuska, you are seriously my favourite SBer. Missed your posts. I hope your mom is doing okay and your head has stopped killing you.
+1 to what Samia said.
Also, the NYT did more than make my teeth hurt.
Thanks for the linky-link, Z!
Welcome back! Hope your Mama's doing OK.
I just wrote a blog piece about this (but God knows when it will show up because RadioUserland is acting buggy again).
I note in the NYT article that the threatened layoffs at Fermilab were conflated with the Dept of Energy spending too much money on "unnecessary" Title IX compliance reviews. I can assure everyone that the DoE spends nothing on Title IX compliance reviews. In fact, in response to my complaint under Title IX about the egregious discriminatory crap happening at Fermilab, the DoE responded to me that Title IX does not apply to the research activities they fund. Given that the only money spent by the DoE on even thinking about Title IX is the time they spent "responding" to my complaint, I guess the conclusion to be drawn by the NYT is that I must be to blame for the monetary situation that almost resulted in layoffs at Fermilab.
The other thing that blows me away is that Title IX is repeatedly talked about as if compliance is some kind of option. Title IX is the *law*. Compliance is not "optional". The science patriarchy has a bad attitude that somehow their work is above any law of the land.
sorry to burst your bubble. here's a little dose of reality: the title ix quota system has hurt men's athletics and will be destructive for women's athletics as well. quota systems don't work. applying title ix to science and engineering will do the same things.
if title ix should be applied where males are the overwhelming majority, why not where women "rule"? shouldn't we go after nursing schools and wipe them out with title ix quotas?
it seems only "fair" that we bring down the entire educational system, rather than just select portions.
Oh, what a freakin' uninformed moron. One, Title IX is NOT a quota system. Two, Title IX has NOT harmed men's athletics; what has harmed it is the ever escalating budgets for the big marquee sports of basketball and football that eat up all the budget and crowd out other men's sports. Three, I would be perfectly happy to support more men going into nursing. Let's raise nurse's salaries and prestige and I bet we will see men flocking into that field.
By the way, you moron, it's not a question of whether or not we WANT to apply Title IX to educational settings. Title IX IS the existing federal law. It already DOES apply. It's just that it hasn't been enforced in educational settings, the way it has for athletics.
Yeah Ttile IX is federal law and so was slavery at one point. I do not that you have nothing to say about the reporter's followups on his NYTimes blog. Here is a example:
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/23/sex-bias-and-data/
sorry, but of the three prongs that may be used to show compliance with title ix in athletic programs, an overwhelming majority of schools (all?) have chosen to use the method most destructive to men's programs: proportionality. that's a fancy name for a quota system.
i hope you're not a moron (like me?) and are capable of learning something from this important discussion about title ix.
http://texasswimming.blogspot.com/2008/07/athletic-director-of-year.html