A good thing (before I get to a bad thing) – someone sent an email to the people at The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe complaining about Rebecca feminism agenda females stopped listening fan ruined yadda. Steve Novella replied in a very good way.
Thanks for your feedback. Sorry you are unhappy with the “this day in skepticism” segment.
To investigate your claim that the segment overemphasizes feminism to a disgusting and off-putting degree, I tallied the last 52 TDIS segments (essentially the last year). This is what I found:
Topic did not involve a specific person – 24
Topic was a man – 21
Topic was a woman – 7It seems you feel that men should be the focus of TDIS more than 3 times as much as women, or that using 13.5% of TDIS segments to highlight women in science is excessive.
Fabulous, isn’t it? 7 women compared to 21 men, and that’s a crushing stifling unbearable Ima stop listening agenda. One commenter, frogmistress, noted:
Representation has been skewed for so long that if you bring up women, they are taking over the topic!
Geena Davis talked about a study she found:
“We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study, where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17 percent women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.”
No wonder all of pop culture is 80 to 90% male – the men perceive that as 50-50.
Steve goes on –
I don’t share this view. In fact, part of the mission of the SGU is to promote science and enthusiasm for science. There is a large gender gap in science, partly because women are not as encouraged as much to pursue STEM careers, and there are fewer role models. (I wrote about this recently here – http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up/ – if you are interested). Making a little effort to highlight some awesome women in science (13.5% of topics) is just part of promoting enthusiasm for science where it is most needed.
In fact, if anything we have not been doing this enough. I thank you for alerting us to this deficiency.
Yessssssss!
Heh, so there’s this support group I go to, and I read that nationally, this particular group is like 95% male. I said, “Hmmm, there’s definitely a gender divide in our local group, but it can’t be worse than 75/25, I don’t think.” Then I actually tried counting a few times. Yeah, it’s like 95%. At least.
So yeah 17% == 50% sounds about right. That’s about how badly I misestimated, and I don’t think I’m unusual in that way. If anything, I’m probably less likely than most men to have a badly skewed perception on that issue(I did think to count to test my assumptions, after all…)
Hypothesis off the top of my head: because the societal default is that men are just people and Women are Different, the presence of women is more salient than the presence of men (is the term “the state of being female is marked”?), and thus the estimate becomes biased because people aren’t counting the numbers, they’re weighing salience. One of those thinking-fast-and-slow situations where our brain skips the difficult thinky counting bit and substitutes an easier question.
And I just typed “people aren’t counting” when in this context I meant “men aren’t counting”, which is probably an example of the same issue. Unk. Bad brain, must do better.
I think it’s not that talking about women, or having women talk is measured against how much men do, it’s against expected silence from/regarding women. 17% is deafening when you’re supposed to have zero, or a single token woman.
“Geena Davis talked about a study she found:
“We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study, where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17 percent women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men.””
This study does not appear to exist.