Is everyone’s morning like this? You get up, you get dressed, you get a stimulating beverage, you knock back the giant pill your doctor is making you take, and then you open the Email and the Twitter and get reminded again that humanity is a great big complex organism that is pocked with suppurating ass pimples, and they’ve all got your address. Today I got to meet @Auto_Math.
@Ainslaw the problem is that the only time women are talking about science, it's to complain that there aren't any women in science 1/2
— Auto_Math (@Auto_Math) November 13, 2014
@Ainslaw if there aren't any women in science,that's the women's fault,they should study physic,math and chemistry instead of humanities 2/2
— Auto_Math (@Auto_Math) November 13, 2014
the problem is that the only time women are talking about science, it’s to complain that there aren’t any women in science. If there aren’t any women in science, that’s the women’s fault, they should study physic, math and chemistry instead of humanities
I don’t think the problem is with women not talking about science, but that they can talk about science and @Auto_Math never listens. Also, I’ve probably had a few thousand women go through my classes: some of those classes required knowledge of physics, math, and chemistry to even get in. I don’t think there’s any lack of women competent in those disciplines. There is a problem with supporting them in careers.
@pzmyers because women are poor defensless creatures incapable of getting irony, 1/2
— Auto_Math (@Auto_Math) November 13, 2014
@pzmyers that would feel so threatened by a shirt that they won't join the scientific community because of it 2/2
— Auto_Math (@Auto_Math) November 13, 2014
because women are poor defensless creatures incapable of getting irony, that would feel so threatened by a shirt that they won’t join the scientific community because of it
Oh. Now the shirt is ironic. That makes it all OK.
I don’t think women feel threatened…or at least, that’s not the primary feeling. Try this for change: imagine that women are people who are capable of making career decisions on their own — they have a sense of enlightened self-interest. They are also intelligent and plastic, capable of adapting to all kinds of situations and finding joy in multiple goals.
I know, we just broke @Auto_Math’s brain, but roll with it.
Many clubhouses dot the land, and they can make choices about which ones to join. Here’s one where they launch rockets and fly space probes to comets; that sounds really cool, except the walls are papered with cheesecake photos of women, and it’s populated with ‘noxious frat boys and blinkered administrators who ignore their behavior.
Do you really think women might avoid such a scene because they don’t know the physics? Or because that scene comes with a whole lot of baggage and bad signals, and they decide they have lives to live, and it’s not worth it if it comes with a career of wrestling assholes?
Well, here’s something uplifting to enjoy:
Rosetta comet landing: Professor cries tears of joy as decade-long dream come true
Good for her!
Of course the Russell’s Teapot avatar reveals a huge lack of self-awareness. Bertrand Russell had quite a few “social justice warrior” tendencies, after all.
David, #1
I’m jealous. That level of pride and sense of achievement must be absolutely ecstatic.
Wait a minute
Who the fuck decided that Humanities are not sciences?
Fuuuuuuck!
That YouTube video has only one comment at the moment and I read it.
Must… resist urge to break things…
There was a woman in my Algebra class and she did good.
Re: the last para, it was very definitely the second one for me. I was head of my high school physics club, and in my final year (Grade 13, in those days), my course load wss:
Physics; Chemistry; Calculus; Comp Sci; Algebra; and English.
My marks were 93 average in the first five, and I rather badly failed English (boredom).
And when I applied to university, I applied as a general Arts student, that is, Humanities. I went on to learn four languages well enough to translate professionally, and among other things I now edit grad-level papers for publication in maths, computer and electrical engineering, and physics. So I think my ability should be apparent, yes?
Why then? Among other things, when I went on a see-what-it’s-like trip to the University of Waterloo (Canada’s top maths/comp sci school), I found the profs and grad students to be appallingly sexist and homophobic. And these were the men chosen to represent the school, their ‘best foot forward’, as it were.
The prospect of facing all that shit, on top of the shit I already knew I’d be drowning in for being trans, meant I turned away. The boys club mentality pushed me out.
Multiply that by thousands, millions of women, queerfolk, and PoC. Is humanity better off that all those good brains left the field, for reasons completely unrelated to ability?
I know women who like to talk about science on the internet who use male names or neutral-sounding nyms to get less hassling. I suspect that PZ’s quoted commenter is blissfully unaware of the rain of shit that sometimes flies in gendered directions.
#whataprivilege
Chances are Auto_Math doesn’t notice when women are talking about things in science besides gender issues.
That’s why up to this (and still) my Twitter feed is full of women talking about this, among them actual astrophysicists and I could see lots of women who were part of this project in the news. Actually, I was thinking “what a moment! Kids, look, there they are, you can be there, too, if you want to!”
But it is also important to point out that if those women do feel threatened, that response is entirely justified. Afterall, here we have a work place were an obnoxious, sexually objectifying frat house mindset is at the very least tolerated if not actively encouraged, and a senior scientist on a high profile project feels comfortable broadcasting his sexual objectifiction of women publicly without fear of censure for his open misogyny. Such an envionment has all the hall marks of being an ideal predator’s playground where any complaint is unlikely to be taken seriously and quite possibly would rebound on the woman’s own career to her detriment, thus ensursing the kind of enforced atmosphere of silence about sexual abuse that predators thrive in.
Even if Taylor himself doesn’t actually present any direct, personal threat to women whatsoever, he clealy exemplifies a mindet that provides ample cover to those who do.
On a tangent – this is the first I’ve heard of Russell’s teapot. I guess I’m not as nerdy as I thought. Could we crowdsource a projecct to launch a teapot in orbit? (If only 1% of us sent in $x )
The dudebro’s shirt needs to be *ironed* — that’s not *irony*. This is the kind of subtle difference that one learns in humanities courses.
Certainly if not threatened there’s a fair amount of discouragement. And if auto_math is only seeing women complaining about the lack of women in science it’s because he’s not listening, because we are here, we are doing science, and we’re also doing science communication.
Though I must admit when we do get women doing physics, they tend not to be there on a lark.
Yeah, my grad years (physics) in the 80s were an eye-opener. Not sure I could have made it if I’d been a woman. Education shouldn’t be a trial by ordeal.
Well…girls don’t do thinky, but maybe they can get the men some coffee? /snark
Seriously, whenever I see biographical stuff from high-achieving women, there is nearly always some sort of story of the difficulties they faced making their way through the boyz-only minefields.
Men in the sciences like to think of themselves as Vulcan…but they’re really Ferengi. /geek speak
Disillusionment Enema
great name for a [fill in genre of your choice] band
chigau, #17
Marching
I noticed he left off “biology” from that science list.
Gee, I wonder why.
I am not a woman nor am I gay. I am not a member of a “racial minority” nor do I have any major disability. I have however experienced environments that are populated by guy’s like automath as too hostile and negative for me to tolerate let alone succeed in.
I would have to say just finding individuals that are tolerant is hard enough, finding an environment that is tolerant has been more difficult. Still looking.
uncle frogy
That article linked in #1 is part of the problem, really. Were any men on the team described in their headlines, or even in their comments, as crying? Did none of them tear up, or was it just useful to note when the woman did it, since women, they be all crying and emotional and shit? UGH.
No, I don’t think the reporter went “Hm, let’s find a woman who is crying and highlight that as part of the global secret conspiracy to discredit women”. But fucking hell, don’t reporters even learn to notice when they’re stereotyping or relying on tired cliches? Isn’t the whole point of reporters that they are supposed to be able to write well?
^this. Then they QUOTED her saying, “Sorry, sorry, now I’ll try and be a professional scientist…”
And then the article was over.
What did she say about the experiment she designed, her field of expertise and accomplishment, and how wonderful it was? Who knows, the article was just about a woman scientist crying.
Here’s HuffPo:
There, how hard was that?
(Ptolemy’s basically a spacegoing mass spectrometer that can analyze gases from a sample of comet material heated in an onboard oven. And Dr. Grady is currently Head of the Dept of Physical Sciences at Open University, and a leading meteoriticist with a Ph.D. from Cambridge.) (from The Conversation)
Here is an example of what Auto_Math likes to retweet.
Gee, what reasonable woman would want to spend time around him?
I’ve mentioned this story before, I know, but…
When I went to Waterloo in the late 1980s/early 1990s, things were problematic but at least improving. Waterloo as a whole still had the most lopsided sex ratio of any major Canadian university, but getting better. The engineering department was engaged in significant outreach. The main first year support person was a woman. While the whole ‘Ridgid Tool’ thing was still going on, the most blatant stuff like Enginews had been shut down years before.
The last year or so I was there, both the President and Vice President of the student Engineering Society were women. Wonderful people, I worked with them while doing the professor assessment surveys. (The previous male EngSoc president moved to the Federation of Students and got embroiled in an ethics violation using Fed resources to advertise for one side of a student vote.)
… And then, I got in one morning and found a poster in a hallway with an obviously faked EngSoc approval stamp, a stock publicity photo of the current EngSoc Pres/VP, and ‘For a good time, call:’ written on it in large letters. Needless to say, I ripped it down and took it into the EngSoc office, where I discovered that they’d been ripping them down all morning. I’d just found one in a back hallway of E3 that nobody else had walked along. It utterly boggled me that somebody would actually do that.
So, yeah, improvement over the past, but still a ways left to go.
I think the only appropriate repose to that way of thinking is from GlaDOS:
“Okay, look: We both said a lot of things that you’re going to regret, but I think we can put our differences behind us; for science… you monster. “
Sure…like, for example, Faye Flam who has a new science column on Forbes.com. She has written about Ebola, and the health consequences of eating salt, milk, and artificial sweeteners. She has written about the evolution of genitals, and of coffee. And several other topics. All in just a very few weeks.
And she has written about the gender gap in science, ummm, carry the 7, divide by pi squared, … ZERO PERCENT so far!
People like AutoMath piss me off. I’ve seen this bullshit in person multiple times, and frequently they’ll tell undergraduate women in physics (after they’ve been informed that the woman they’re talking to is a physics major) that they should major in a real science and not just complain about it. And sometimes it’s professors saying it.
@laurentweppe:
Devaluing the Humanities is one of the big problems with anti-intellectualism in the US (and probably in Europe too, but I don’t know for sure), but the humanities aren’t science. And they don’t have to be to be valuable.
Let’s all have a moment of silence for the word “irony”. All definition stripped away, it now stands merely as a lifeless husk of letters.
Reminds me of how creationists claim that anything less than a 100% optimally functioning eye is useless. The douchebros claim to be so big on evolution, you’d think they’d be able to think at the population level. But of course, that would require being able to think critically and apply concepts to things outside their little hobby horses.
I wonder if auto-math would be such a freeze peach supporter if that guy had been wearing a shirt with a Tom from Finland print.
Sitting in the train next to some stranger googling Tom from Finland.. I like to live dangerously.
Incidentally, for anyone who is at work and attempting what sumdum is doing, just know that Tom of Finland is NSFW.
When Apollo 11 took off: “At lift-off, I cried for the first time in 20 years, and prayed for the first time in 40,” Arthur C Clarke recalled.
Amazingly men cry at great achievements too. There may well have been male engineers in that room hugging and crying, not just high fiving and yelling. But OMG let’s put a spotlight on the woman.
Hey, guess what?
According to a new study by researchers at Cornell University, political correctness works. In creativity exercises involving mixed-gender groups, Jack Goncalo and his colleagues found that people instructed to be politically correct generated a greater quantity of novel ideas than those instructed merely to be polite, or given no instructions at all.
““Our work challenges the widespread assumption that true creativity requires a kind of anarchy in which people are permitted to speak their minds, whatever the consequence,” said Dr. Jack Goncalo, an associate professor of organizational behavior.”
BOOM.
*drops mic*
(adds in citation: via shakesville)
carlie
Could that be partly due to the fact that, when PC is imposed on groups (oh the horror), its members must think outside of their regular thinking boxes in order to fit with the new requirements? How difficult it must be, to look at solutions beyond the easiest and most common within reach!
rq:
Speaking as totally-not-an-expert, I suspect you’d find that in the PC groups, there’s more communication happening. If you’re asked to be polite, you can “politely” ignore someone else’s ideas if you choose. If you’re asked to be PC, you have to acknowledge their idea at the very least, which almost guarantees more communication, and communication has always been the key to successful group work.
jste
Hm, that too, probably. Though it’s possible to communicate well within the confines of limited thinking, but I see your point.
Not to mention that when “people are permitted to speak their minds, whatever the consequence” the conversation tends to end up being totally dominated by those people most oblivious to or adept at avoiding consequences.
(Sort of like how when people are forced to be “polite” the conversation winds up being dominated by the people most adept at dancing frantically just on the side of the line, sort-of-adhering to the letter of the instruction while flinging down and dancing upon the spirit.)
Geography is not a science?
Anthropology is not a science?
Archeology is not a science?
Psychology is not a science?
I ask once again: Who the fuck decided that Humanities are not sciences?
The borderline between humanities and social sciences is pretty fuzzy, and the borderline between social sciences and science is equally fuzzy. Physical geography is a science, human geography a social science. Stick the others on that spectrum where you will. I think the one thing we can all agree on is that the only subject that is objectively superior to the others is pure mathematics.
What’s now called ‘science’ used to be known as ‘natural philosophy’. It used to be part of the humanities. The distinction was drawn in no small part in order to create a hierarchy of sorts; veneration of Science® as the high watermark of everything is strongly associated with positivism – whose leading light, ironically, was sociologist Auguste Comte.
Notably, the distinction between “the sciences” and “the humanities” is, as far as I can see, a largely Anglosphere phenomenon. Elsewhere, the line tends to be drawn more between theoretical activities (which are called ‘science’) and practical activities (which are ‘technical’). Hilariously, the interdependence between these fields is enormous, and while physical science people often (rightly) deplore the fact that you can get very far in social science and the humanities with no understanding of physical science, they also often ooze the attitude that the humanities and social science have literally nothing of value to offer to people focusing on physical science.
I suspect that attitude has a strong connection to the difficulties of non-privileged groups in STEM fields…
laurentweppe
I figure some people would make a distinction between what they’d call “social sciences” and (other) “humanities,” which they’d count as something like music, literature, theater, visual arts, etc. There is something to that, but not much. There’s also a sort of reactionary tendency to want to treat the humanities as if they worked just like physics, which is unfortunate. They need different methods and such, just like the “special sciences” do.
Anyway, the line is blurry no matter what kind of scheme you come up with, and you’d more or less have to say things like “some historians are doing scientific work, some aren’t” (just like some physicists are and some aren’t), instead of talking about an academic discipline as a whole. Which seems pointless to me.
Since I know a bit about music, I’ll say that some musicologists are doing science, many aren’t, and it doesn’t make much sense to make an evaluation like that about “all of music,” as if it’s really some monolithic, homogeneous thing with no important differences among the many sub-fields that word captures. Right away, it should be obvious that a performer (or composer or another sort of producer) isn’t doing the same kind of work as a theorist of some sort — so the idea just fails immediately. (Maybe they thought it was performers all the way down? Who knows what the fuck they were thinking?) Anyway, it’s just a word, as they say, and its usefulness doesn’t extend that far into carving nature at its joints.
I mean, what do you even call people who are doing “anthropological” or “neuroscientific” work in music? Or what about theorists who look more at the mathematical/logical formal properties of music? And fuck, we’d be totally lost if we started considering “philosophy of” music (or of anything else). Is it just a matter of which building they work in most of the time, who signs their paycheck, or something silly like that? I would say they’re in some gray area where several different fields overlap, not in one and only one field as opposed to another. The latter sort of idea comes from ignorant people, or people who don’t even care about the subject in question, or don’t need to think about it much — those are the ones who make up this simple picture of academia with big, bright, stupid boundary lines drawn all over it. They care about their field, and they know what it’s like and how it works — for the rest you just get this vague, useless garbage.
Dr Marcus Hill Ph.D. (arguing from his own authority):
Well, you don’t need us to agree. You argue from your own authority. ;)
It’s a quirk of the English language. German, for instance, instead distinguishes “nature sciences” – what tends to be called “science” in English – from “mind sciences”*. My sister studied comparative literature – she made hypotheses and tested them in her thesis; that’s science.
* Unfortunately, “mind” is the same word as “spirit/ghost”. I hate that. It keeps generating woo.
Going back to the crying women scientists, here’s a photo of a crying man scientist following the Philae landing.
***
As a french, I hail from a country were no distinction is made between humanities and social sciences, but where the distinction between “hard” sciences and social science is alive and well, and especially appreciated by politicians and businessmen angry at urbanists/sociologists/whatever schooled them about some shitty decision on their part: cue the usual infuriating “You’re not even a Real scientist, while I have Real expertise“.