Ophelia posted this bad cartoon.
The cartoonist might want to consider reading Nature magazine today.
The problem is worth, once again, stating clearly. In the United States and Europe, around half of those who gain doctoral degrees in science and engineering are women — but barely one-fifth of full professors are women. Women are not invited in significant numbers to sit on the scientific advisory boards of start-up companies. A scientific conference at which half of the keynote speakers are women stands out simply because of that.
The challenge and the consequences of the lack of women in research — especially at senior levels — are expressed in many ways, with worrying persistence. Evidence suggests that too many women encounter patronizing attitudes or harassment in research contexts — whether at work, at academic conferences or in the field. Recent evidence, such as studies of mock hiring exercises, and analysis of grant success rates, authorship assignment and citation counts, suggests that discrimination against women runs deep in the psyches of both genders.
So much for the notion that it’s a bunch of social sciences women whining about sour grapes.
And, by the way, can we please abandon this bias that the social sciences are somehow inferior to the ‘hard’ sciences? My wife has a psychology Ph.D., and there are things she knows that I don’t and vice versa.
I’m sure it’s just sheer coincidence that a man is at the STEM booth and a woman is at the Gender Studies booth.
And that the man is wearing blue and the woman pink…
And all the women in the last panel look alike.
Uh, yeah. When I was in engineering college there were more than a few professors who would say flat out that they didn’t think women should be engineers.
I remember more than one that tried to put that into practice. I remember my girlfriend at the time showing me one of her tests where she had made a minor mathematical error. Not a big deal but she lost 20 points out of 30 for that mistake. A male colleague of hers in the same class, on the same test had made an identical mistake and he got 2 out of 30 points deducted.
So, yeah, a lot of quiet sexism in academia. Most of the women I knew finally decided it was just easier to go out into the working world where there were better HR departments, better pay, better job security and fewer patronizing assholes.
The comic is correct.
Only it’s missing the roughly 5000 panels before this one where those young women were not given a science kit, were wearing shoes that were pretty but unsuitable for exploring, got to hear they’re good at maths in spite of being girls, where given maths exercises where they had to calculate lipsticks, told that they shouldn’t work in labs cause they distract the guys….
And who knew that being a women’s studies major would turn my hair pink? I missed out!
They “forgot” to show men signing up for STEM in the second panel and then being sexist in the third panel.
(Though the process would need to be iterative to achieve the end result of gendered sorting, and would need to involve our culture’s history of men working and women in the home etc.).
Having looked more closely at the cartoon, it also seems interesting that the woman in the booth has neck length red hair and glasses, and that the three women who visit her in the first two panels do not. However, by the third panel, when what appear to be those same three women (judging from the clothing) are holding up placards protesting sexism in science, all of them suddenly have neck length red hair and glasses.
That strikes me as possibly being a not very subtle jab at Rebecca Watson, as well as an oblique reference to the ‘hivemind’ quality of feminism that exists only in the febrile imaginings of MRA nitwits. With a Twitter tag like ‘@AntiFemComics’ it would hardly surpise me.
Dang – ninja’d by Chigau @ 3… ;-)
Chigau, 3:
Don’t you see? The women who signed up for the Gender Studies course were morphed into the original occupant of the booth, as a symbol of how they were absorbed into the Feminist Hive Mind.
Is it just me or do those women (and the original Gender Studies woman) look a bit like Rebecca Watson? That would explain things, since it’s trite that she’s to blame for everything.
Yeah, good luck with that. It is an unspoken law in rightwing circles that all social science is flawed and/or biased, being performed by flunkies who couldn’t hack it in real sciences. This is mandatory, for it alone allows them to dismiss all social science that explodes their meritocratous view of society. If they admit that social science is real science, the backbone of the GOP theology would collapse.
Hi five, Gregory Greenwood. Same thought at the same time. The Hivemind Is Real!
@erichoug – An engineering college professor who confuses 2 with 20 should seriously reconsider who should and who shouldn’t be engineer.
Shit.
Of course it’s Rebecca Watson. FeministHair and all.
Gen, Uppity Ingrate and Ilk @ 12;
I knew you were going to say that. Spooky… ;-)
OK, now we have telepathy down, when do I get my other funky Force Powers? I will need to hone my ego-push, useful for fracturing the arrogance of MRAs everwhere.
Also, when it comes time to forge my femi-sabre, can I have a nice electric pink sabre crystal? I want to do this with style…
I’m sure that if we pretend that women just aren’t interested in STEM fields* and just like to complain, that will make the problem go away. Loudly proclaiming about sour grades always works.
(Also, all science has biases, since it’s done by human beings. Especially as you get closer to science that affects us directly — astrophysics just has the ‘this is my idea, and I want to be right’, but mammalian biology says something about humans in general. In some sense, the social sciences are better off for explicitly recognizing that all humans are biased and good science copes with that, rather than by pretending we can become completely unbiased**.)
* Never mind asking why women might not be interested or lose interest as they progress from kindergarten through high school and college. Or why woman might join a field that is full of other women, rather than one where they might be the only woman in their class or lab.
** Certainly we can become less biased, but a lot of that requires being aware of bias.
The missing second panel has the women stopping at the STEM booth and being told to move along.
Nah, that couldn’t be Rebecca Watson in the Gender Studies booth – her hair stays the same color from start to finish!
AFAWK, Watson has a degree in communications, not gender studies.
It’s interesting that in Britain at least, lab technician was traditionally a female job. So women were (are?) present in STEM fields in large numbers but holding lower-ranking posts, just as the medical profession has traditionally had large numbers of female nurses with higher ranking male doctors. Do any of you in STEM fields have any insight into how that’s working out in other cultures or in the present day?
“AntiFem comics”?
Seriously???
Observations:
1. The biggest lie in the cartoon is that Gender Studies is somehow blocking enrolment in STEM.
2. Actually, the social sciences do suffer from significant problems compared to the physical sciences. My mother (PhD psychology, long-time senior lecturer) once told me that psychology was a collection of observations in search of a science. This is why evopsych fools can prosper where they would be utter failures if they tried to pass off their work in hard biology/evolution journals. BUT, this should not be seen as triumphalism for the hard sciences. The reason for the softness in the “soft sciences” is because it’s more difficult to study. You can’t control social variables as easily as you can physical variables like temperature, you can’t observe effects on 10^23 subjects, and nobody is all that concerned about the ethics of manipulating electrons. Even then, too many of the “hard science” cheer squad forget how many times ultra-hard scientists like physicists have got things completely wrong (Kelvin on the age of the Earth, neutrinos travelling faster than light) for embarrassingly bad reasons. And it certainly doesn’t mean you can dismiss “soft” sciences out of hand. After all, the observation that 50% of STEM graduates are women but less than 10% of STEM professors is a hard finding.
The folks who disparage social sciences are the Cargo Cult rationalists who don’t understand science and just look for the silhouette they expect to see based on movies and TV. If there’s not a lab with beakers, or explosions, or oscilloscopes, or computers printing out stacks of green and white striped paper, it isn’t science. The worst part is that Cargo Cult rationalists include working scientists who are completely ignorant outside of their narrow specialty.
lol “STEM fields” is just one booth.
chigau (違う) wrote:
Feminist hair and feminist “cat eye” glasses. These people sure love their stereotypes.
All that’s missing is a Matt Taylor shirt on the guy.
Tim Hunt is still a very prominent member in the board of governors at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan.
It’s missing the word bubbles. Let my fix it:
First Panel: ” Hey laaaaadies, wanna clean my test tube? I’m doing free breast exams too.”
Second Panel: “Where are you going? Get over here and make as a sandwich and give me a blowjob!”
Third Panel: “You lesbo, femi-nazi, SJWs! Science is men’s work anyway!”
There! That makes things clearer.
“Gee, there sure is a lack of colour on this college campus, isn’t there?”
@ scienceavenger:
True, but incomplete. The right wing loves them some social sciences when it, say, puts black people lower on The Bell Curve. Similarly, they hate the physical sciences when it requires eliminating reliance on fossil fuels (ClimateGate!)
Some natural “scientists”* hate the social/cultural sciences because those folks dare to question your assumptions. You know, you’re doing all that science, all those tests, crunch your numbers, present your stuff as the objective truth and then some philosopher, sociologist, gender/cultural studies PhD comes along, takes a very hard look at your premises and points out a problem with the construct.
*I like German much better in that respect. It’s “Naturwissenschaften” and “Geisteswissenschaften”, science of nature and science of the mind. The English terms “science” and “arts” already imply that one is more true than the other.
chrislawson
Oh yes. And that’s not just the “soft sciences” like sociology or psychology. Once you get to “arts”, you’re in deep shit. Because things are not just clear and easy, but really have many layers and aspects.
If you’ve ever written a literary essay and your mate wrote about the same topic but had a very different wone it doesn’t mean that “anything goes”. It means that everything is damn messy and really hard to sort out. One of the reasons I initially wanted to write my final thesis in linguistics is exactly that: much easier to do: you got the data, you got your hypothesis, you crunch your numbers, you evaluate, done.
I would love that to be true, but in all honesty there’s also a big factor of it being easier to dress up hot air as science and obscure BS when there’s no well-established way to present your assumptions, data, calculations and reasoning in a formalised and easy to check way. It’s much harder to fake your way through a mathematical proof or the results of a spectroscopy experiment with pretentious language than through a philosophy essay, and unfortunately there are enough people taking advantage of this.
It also doesn’t help when the person doing the quantitative aspects of some research is just as clueless about stats as the person reviewing it, and there’s a bit of selection bias for that to be the case the “soft” sciences. As a mathematician, I’m very glad to see a trend towards taking proper stats more seriously in all fields (and that includes supposedly “hard” subjects like medicine.)
Didn’t you get the memo? All people interested in social-justice, and especially feminists, are required to dye their hair in the classic “dismayed wild cherry” shade and wear thick-rimmed cat eye glasses. It’s a graduation requirement in womens’ studies, actually. Bonus points for “quirky” haircut, nostril or lip piercing, and baggy corduroy pants plus clunky shoes.
Interestingly, the neckbeard look doesn’t seem compulsory in STEM…?
Ysanne
That’s why we haven’t had any massive scale research frauds in the hard sciences in a long time.
Oh, wait…
It’s happening and it often takes a long time before people catch up. Just remember Wakefield, the Lancet and the death toll it has taken since. And we also know that it is possible to lie with science by using actual scientific methods (the chocolate study).
I’ll say this: the line between fraud and not is probably a lot easier to draw in biology than in philosophy.
I know, a lot of philosophy etc. just sounds like very little said in pretentious language. I used to think that myself. Then I did more work in the area and holy fuck that shit’s real. I recently joked with CD about “discursively constructed subject position” being my “safe word”. Now that sure sounds like a lot of argle bargle pretentious language. Only that it isn’t. It’s terms of art that have a specific meaning the same way medical speech sounds like argle bargle to laypeople.
Thinking about it, I’m not sure if “fraud” in that sense is actually possible in philosophy/cultural studies (unless we’Re talking plagiarism). You cannot commit fraud, you can only demonstrate that your thinking is shoddy and superficial.
It’s not even true that women (for various reason) aren’t singing up for STEM fields. In my university, biochemistry is 55% women at the undergraduate level and has been for over a decade. Yet, the professors are still 80-90% men. To pretend that this is simply a question of self-selection is just flat-out wrong.
I’ll just leave this link here for videos covering an event on Gender Equity in the Natural Sciences. Especially the talk by Nancy Hopkins (first video, ~13 minutes in) was really good.
Indeed. Anyone who’s actually studied science or engineering should be fairly well aware that there is no shortage of women at this level, what with having sat in lectures and tutorials with them for years… Therefore, the only reasonable conclusion is that none of the people claiming that women just don’t sign up for these fields hasn’t actually studied them themselves, and is just making stuff up.
Actually, the fraction of people who go through STEM and then into science, etc is substantially smaller than the general population. STEM is to science and science-avoiders as the bible is to religion and atheists.
This cartoon repeats the standard excuse for all observed disparities of this sort: “[insert maligned group here] aren’t being discriminated against — they just don’t WANT to go into this field!”
They tend to fake the data, not the way the conclusions follow from the data.
The point of that study was that its science was really extremely bad. The authors didn’t even try to submit it to a peer-reviewed journal, they went to the equivalent of a diploma mill straight away. But they wrote a press release, and the journalists lapped it up. Conclusion: you can lie to journalists, and thus to the general public, by doing science all wrong.
STEM means “science, technology and mathematics”…? (Or was it medicine?)
David Marjanović @ # 38 – Last I heard, STEM comprises Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics.
I contend that the “T” is redundant – what part of “technology” isn’t covered by science &/or engineering? – but I ain’t nobody and my vote don’t count.
I have Asperger’s, so I find it hard to read and predict people. I’m much better at understanding inanimate objects because they tend to be simpler and more consistent than humans. Then you get into things like political science, where the subject involves large groups of humans. And then there’s the “dismal science” of economics which has lots of “hard” numbers to crunch and all the “soft” issues because humans are involved. While I love the simple elegance and clarity of “hard” science, I salute the people who do the difficult and often trivialized work of making sense out of the messy, complex fields. I would be far out of my element, there.
Yes, I suspect dealing with complex topics like the human mind tends to make it easier for hucksters and those with other nasty agendas to mislead the public, or for outdated preconceptions and flawed self-perspective to bias an honest but misguided researcher. Those are really difficult challenges to acknowledge and overcome, not an excuse for armchair defeatism by calling the subject “worthless” or “fraudulent.” Yes, the ambiguities and uncertainties can be frustrating to a layperson like me, but I know there are a lot of people working hard on fixing that, and that we have a very long road ahead of us.
Lumping everything together as STEM distorts the picture. Women are earning PhDs at a high rate in more popular fields like health, social and biological sciences (~70%, 61%, 52%) vs physical, math/comp,engineering sciences (41%,31%,23%).
An annual excess of 6000 female health/psych doctorates will never address the overwhelmingly male makeup of engineering/physics faculty.
If it’s not quantitative it’s not science. A science is “softer” in the degree that statistical approximations replace precision modeling.
I think part of the problem is the deplorable state of STEM in general. Funding is down, leaving lots of people (due to the “study STEM! Be part of the future!” push of recent years) scrambling for pieces of an ever-shrinking pie. There’s also the fact that the “get started in your career” phase (graduate school and post-docs) is when someone’s typically in their mid-to-late twenties, which is prime settle-down-make-babies age. And academia – STEM academia especially – flatly fails to give women the flexibility they need to do both. Plus of course the fact that a post-doc making nationally competitive post-doc wages would, if they have a kid, qualify for Medicaid and food stamps in most places. I’ll say that again just to make sure I’m understood: nationally competitive wages for a job that require a doctoral degree are, from a social safety net-qualification perspective, poverty wages.
At its base, though, is that STEM – collectively – seems to be of the attitude that women who are able to handle STEM culture will do okay, and women who can’t just weren’t cut out for it. The possibility that STEM culture might be toxic is not to be considered.