What’s in a name

Sean Carroll points out a study of gender bias among scientists.

To test scientists’ reactions to men and women with precisely equal qualifications, the researchers did a randomized double-blind study in which academic scientists were given application materials from a student applying for a lab manager position. The substance of the applications were all identical, but sometimes a male name was attached, and sometimes a female name.

Results: female applicants were rated lower than men on the measured scales of competence, hireability, and mentoring (whether the scientist would be willing to mentor this student). Both male and female scientists rated the female applicants lower. [Read more…]

Deeyah and Banaz

Deeyah has produced and directed a documentary film about the “honour” killing of Banaz Mahmod in South London in 2006. Deeyah talks to A Safe World for Women.

If you worry about offending the Muslim, Sikh, Hindu or any other community by criticising honour killings, then you are complicit in perpetuating it. Our silence provides the fertile soil and circumstances for this oppression and violence to continue. It’s not Islamophobic or racist to protest against honour killings. [Read more…]

Fog

I took Cooper to the beach this afternoon, his first time since he had his paw stitched. It had been a foggy morning but was pretty sunny in the afternoon, though not as hot as it had been the last few days. The park where the beach is (Golden Gardens) was sunny, and I chucked the ball (with the chuckit) on the grass before we got to the beach and Cooper chased it, and then we got to the little trail through the Scotch Broom (aka gorse) to the beach…and we were in a different universe – some of the thickest fog I’ve ever seen, which got thicker while we were there. It was weird and beautiful. There was just the water, and blur. Blur south, blur north, blur west, and blur behind us, east, where the park still was, in the sun.

When we got back home (which is on a hilltop that overlooks Puget Sound) the fog was still there, just a strip over the middle part of the Sound. It was like a Thing – a long serpent stretched south to north over part of the water.

It was innaresting.

Child marriage in Britain

Maryam reports that there’s growing evidence that very young girls are being “married” to much older men in Sharia courts in the UK. Girls as young as five.

A recent undercover investigation by the Sunday Times found imams in Britain willing to “marry” young girls, provided this was carried out in secret. The imams had been approached by an undercover reporter posing as a father who said he wanted his 12 year old daughter married, to prevent her from being tempted in to a “western lifestyle”. [Read more…]

Sam Harris does a spot of carpentry

I often find Sam Harris irritating, but he can be very good at hitting the right nail on the head. He is in his new piece on the freedom to offend.

I’ll just give a few examples of nail-hitting.

Whether over a film, a cartoon, a novel, a beauty pageant, or an inauspiciously named teddy bear, the coming eruption of pious rage is now as predictable as the dawn. This is already an old and boring story about old, boring, and deadly ideas. [Read more…]

How about interfaith healing?

Faith healing doesn’t work; would interfaith healing do better?

No. So why is interfaith such a good thing again? Why is faith a good thing?

It’s not.

Consider Randi and Russel Bellew for instance. (No, I don’t know why Russel spells his own name wrong.)

A Creswell,  Ore., husband and wife have pleaded guilty to negligent homicide charges in the faith healing death of their 16-year-old son.

KVAL-TV reports that the teen, Austin Sprout, died at home last December after his appendix  burst. Lane County sheriff’s Capt. Byron  Trapp says medical professionals believe the boy’s condition was treatable had he been provided medical care.

Ya think?

That’s one hell of a painful death those two damn fools inflicted on their kid.

 

Now all shouty

Another piece on women in tech fields. The takeaway:

It was always the ones that said they didn’t see gender or color who did the most damage. “They’re just words,” they would say, “Why do you let them hurt you?” And with that, my pain was made as invisible as me. “They’re just words.” Indeed, just the verbal incantations of power, like law and code and everything else that made the world. I decided to leave tech for words. [Read more…]

No thank you

There’s a dreadfully wrong-headed article by Eboo Patel in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. You can probably guess the gist if you remember that he’s one of Chris Stedman’s favorite interfaithy types. The gist is that faith is great, it doesn’t matter what kind as long as it’s faith, and it’s a kind of identity like race so let’s start making sure there’s lots of diversity of it, because faith.

Part of the rationale for 1990s-era campus multiculturalism was to remedy the racial bias in the broader society: to lift up underrepresented narratives, to remind people that many communities have contributed to the American project, to ensure that our perceptions of race were not driven by the crime reports on the evening news. Gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity all got some airtime, but mostly we talked about race. And one form of identity was almost totally excluded: faith. [Read more…]

Forty seven percent

I know it’s obvious, I know it’s too easy, I know everybody and its dog is all over it, but can I just point and laugh at Romney a little all the same? Because it’s too perfect.

That is how they think. I know some, and that’s how they think. They think everybody who isn’t rich is contemptible, and out to steal their stuff. [Read more…]

One shudders to think of chapter 5

This is funny. I got a tweet from Linky @LinkyGray saying

putting on an event celebrating & supporting women in science and media, called LogicGrrrl in Edinburgh, cld you spread word?

So I said sure and asked if she had any useful links and in the meantime I tried Google, which turned up nothing relevant but did turn up something from a Christian apologetics site explaining “Girl Logic.” It’s chapter 4 of something (a book? a manifesto?) called What does a Woman Want? A Real Man. [Read more…]