Oh, lord, no more

By now, you’ve all heard about the unpleasantry between Monica Byrne and Bora Zivkovic. Bora screwed up. He let his personal desires interfere with his professional obligations and he wrecked what could have been a productive interaction.

I’m happy that he has come forward and openly expressed contrition. We all screw up — what’s important is that we recognize it and try to better ourselves.

Janet Stemwedel has an excellent response in which she takes a broader view.

We should hold each other to high standards and then get serious about helping each other reach those standards. We should keep tinkering with our culture to making being better to each other (and to ourselves) easier, not harder.

Being good can be hard, which is one of the reasons we need friends.

I stand with others who have been harassed. And I hope, as a loving and honest friend with high expectations, I can help bring about a world with fewer harassers in it.

Meanwhile, we men (because it’s mostly us who have the power tilted in our favor) should just assume that every woman has laid out Kathleen Raven’s set of rules. Make those your base assumptions in every professional interaction.

Just as an exercise, when you read those rules, try imagining applying them to interactions between two professional men. That they would virtually never have to be stated tells you quite a bit about the differences in how women are treated.

Also, if you plan to protest that it’s unfair to expect men to behave this way, or that it’ll interfere with your love life, or that some women might like being treated specially in the office, please go read Chris Clarke’s metaphor. If you don’t get it, and don’t understand what he’s talking about, you’re not smart enough to converse here yet, and you should just read quietly until it sinks in.

First, let me apologize for the use of the word “unpleasantry” above — I was going for what I thought was obvious understatement, and it wasn’t read that way. I think this is a terrible, awful, miserable thing that Bora has done, and I sincerely hope he can do better.

Other news: Bora has resigned from the ScienceOnline board.

Stephen Fry meets a ‘reparative therapist’

Gentle bemusement and delicate debunking ensues.

The question I always want to ask these people is whether the reverse is possible: whether with the right psychological tinkering, they themselves could be switched from heterosexual to homosexual. They always seem to be so certain that their conventional sexuality is such an intrinsic and essentialist part of their identity, yet the premise of their therapy is that sexuality must be so much more fluid.

It’s Ada Lovelace Day!

Buy the T-shirt!

Buy the T-shirt!

You’re supposed to celebrate the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and math today. Some of you women out there will be doing science today, some of you will read about it, and some of you will be doing like I’m doing: teaching it to women (and men!). At the very least, try to tell a girl that she can grow up to be anything she wants — and that includes being a mathematician, an engineer, or a scientist.

An official reply from Scientific American

Oh, my. What a lovely example of a not-pology. I think it’s a common refusal to acknowledge error in full blossom!

We deeply regret that we were not able to communicate our decision to Dr. Lee before removing the post on a late Friday afternoon before a long weekend. We recognize that it would have been better to fully explain our position before its removal, but the circumstances were such that we could not make that happen in a timely way.

They did nothing wrong, they would have removed the post no matter what, her only sin was having a dying cell phone so she wasn’t able to bossplain to DNLee why she needed to roll over and accept this entirely reasonable executive decision. Oh, and Scientific American must protect their interests by making sure that all the facts presented by their bloggers are entirely accurate and confirmed.

Wow. So they go through every blog post over there with that degree of thoroughness? I’m impressed. I’m not so impressed with their respect for their bloggers, though.

She might be interested in looking at Popehat’s interpretation of events.

Perhaps “Ofek” is some kind of scientist. If he is, and his identity is revealed, he is likely to experience significant social consequences — that is, he is likely to be treated as someone who calls women “whore” when they decline to provide him with free content. But Ofek is currently in the business of spamming bloggers to ask them to contribute free content to a sordid little advertising-heavy aggregator site in order to increase traffic and thereby increase advertising revenue to Ofek and Ofek’s team. In other words, Ofek has ceased to be a scientist and begun a career as a marketeer.

And marketeers are entitled douchebags. Within the context of online marketing, Ofek’s behavior is perfectly typical. Ofek’s belief — that he is entitled to profit off of Ms. Lee’s work, and that she’s worthy of abuse if she objects — is the apotheosis of marketeer culture.

I see that not-pology as an admission that Scientific American is an enthusiastic collaborator in marketeer culture.

Guest post: Fighting for refugee and migrant rights

[This is a guest post from Walton. Trigger warnings: violence, sexual abuse, child abuse and neglect, hyperskepticism, racism.]

In January 2013, Jackie Nanyonjo was forcibly returned to Uganda on a charter flight, escorted by guards from the private security contractor Reliance. Jackie was a lesbian woman from Uganda who had come to the UK to claim asylum, fleeing the wave of horrifying anti-gay violence in her home country. In common with many other LGBT asylum-seekers, her claim was rejected, authorities refusing to believe that she was “really” a lesbian. She was detained, and eventually put on a plane back to Uganda. With no options left to her, she resisted – and was beaten so badly by her security escort that she later died of her injuries.

[Read more…]

Justine

Justine has story of sexual assault in the tech industry. Long story short, she was at a Ruby conference (they apparently have a reputation for boozing it up at Ruby events), she was drinking, her boss was drinking, he took their mutual inebriation as an excuse to take serious liberties with her, she said “no”, he wouldn’t take no for an answer, and another person had to step in and peel him away. The event was serious enough that her boss was subject to a later HR investigation and was fired.

All of these events have been thoroughly corroborated by a witness, and by the guy who stepped in. The assaulter has announced that he was in “funemployment”, of course expressing no remorse or guilt — you wouldn’t know it from what he wrote that he stuck his hand down an employees pants and his tongue down her throat while she vocally protested.

The problem is the aftermath. She liked and respected her boss before this incident, and now she’s wracked with guilt and self-recrimination and just general stress.

Joe O’Brien’s sexual assault on me impacted my life then and still continues to this day. Initially I went through a period of self-punishment. Convinced there was something I did wrong that made this assault happen to me. Did I wear something wrong? Did I lead someone on? Hugs hand forehead kisses have always been a big part of my relationships with my co-workers. We were always a tight knit family. But now I felt it was all wrong. Every day I went to work I second guessed what I was wearing. I kept my mouth shut for fear I’d say something wrong or misleading. In the worst case I stopped eating and lost 30 pounds in two months. People were worried but again, for the most part left me alone. Maybe out of awkwardness, maybe because they didn’t know what to say, maybe because they had no clue what was going on because nobody was notified.

These issues still affected me months later. I went months without eating. My boyfriend at the time witnessed me turn from a voluptuous woman to what he called a skeleton in just two short months. I couldn’t stand to be touched by him anymore. Our relationship fell apart within just a few weeks. I came home every night and drank myself stupid just so I didn’t have to think about the anxiety I felt having to go back to the office the next morning. Friday nights and Saturdays were mostly fine but pretty much on the dot, 8:00pm on a Sunday I would start hyperventilating, crying and binge drinking so I didn’t have to think about going back to the office the following morning.

These are appropriate responses to an event she took very seriously and found extremely traumatic — which also conflicted with her career and the community she was working within. This is how she reacted to an occasion when she was disempowered and manhandled and made to feel helpless by a person she had trusted, and no one else can tell her how she should feel about it.

But they do. Oh, they do.

Do not read the comments on Justine’s post unless you really want to lose all faith in humanity. I repeat, do not read the comments. They are the true horror here.

They tell her that she’s weak and she needs to toughen up. She’s a loser. “Bitch deserved it.” She should have called the cops! Because she didn’t call the cops, it was clearly not a major problem. She should be ashamed for costing a guy his job when his offense didn’t even rise to a level that would justify calling the cops. She’s an attention whore. “I hope you get raped tomorrow you dumb slut”. She enjoyed getting her vagina fingered, if they’d just gotten a room and had sex she’d be happy now. She overreacted. There are “people dying in Africa,” she should shut up. She’s playing the victim. She was drunk, so she deserved it. “another example how a woman can destroy a man’s life at a whim with a rape accusation.” She’s a whore. Women “simply don’t have the mental tools to survive outside the kitchen”.

Weirdly, Richard Stallman shows up to lecture everyone on how to properly refer to GNU/Linux.

There are rape threats. There are death threats. “Men are men” and “there is no rape culture.”

There are people with men’s names and people with women’s names shrieking at her — I even recognized some of them as people who have been banned here.

Don’t read that horrible comment thread. But if you do, recognize it for what it is: evidence of the truth that our culture has a sick attitude towards women.

Adjust your image of cave painters

You may have heard that men and women have some subtle differences in morphology — there is considerable variation and overlap, of course, but there are discernable patterns. It’s not just the obvious breasts and shoulders and hips, either, but, for instance, slight differences in the hands. Men tend to have ring fingers that are longer than their index fingers, while those two fingers in women are of approximately equal length. Which makes it interesting that many Paleolithic cave paintings include tracings of the artists’ hands.

hands

You can see where this is going. We should measure digit lengths in these stencils!

Archaeologist Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University analyzed hand stencils found in eight cave sites in France and Spain. By comparing the relative lengths of certain fingers, Snow determined that three-quarters of the handprints were female.

"There has been a male bias in the literature for a long time," said Snow, whose research was supported by the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration. "People have made a lot of unwarranted assumptions about who made these things, and why."

There need to be massive caveats to the interpretation of the data. In modern populations, variation and overlap means that assessments of sex from digit lengths only has 60% accuracy, which is terrible — I checked out my own hands with a crude visual inspection, and by my right I’m a woman, by my left I’m a man, and both have very slight differences. Their sample size is also very small: 32 hands that were clear and sharp enough to measure. But at the same time, they report that the degree of sexual dimorphism in the hands was much greater than is seen in modern populations Well, maybe: I’d like to see the dimorphism data for modern hunter-gatherer populations, in particular from African populations with their greater genetic diversity. Also, you can’t call it sexual dimorphism if you don’t have an independent measure of the sex of the handprints. Maybe there was greater non-sexual variation in hand shape and, for instance, women made all of the stencils, but 15,000 years ago 25% of women had “man hands”.

Still, at least the data says that the cave painters were more diverse than expected, which fits better with a hypothesis that both men and women were active participants in these surviving, visible aspects of Paleolithic culture.

The problem is that scientists are human

Unfortunately. What that means is that an endeavor that ought to be impartial and based on reasoned evaluation of the evidence is tainted by bias and unavoidable cultural preconceptions. We’ve got religion turning some people into credulous twits, but just as poisonous, we have sexism skewing our analyses.

The first thing we did was look at more than 3,000 articles published between 1980 and 2006 in 12 leading peer-reviewed international relations journals. We then controlled for every possible factor that could contribute to one’s citation count including the quality of the publication, its venue, methodology, the subject matter, and the researcher’s home institution (to name a few). We suspected that an article written by a tenured professor from an elite university, published in a top journal and written on a popular topic would get more citations than an article written by an untenured professor at a liberal arts college on an esoteric topic in a second-tier journal. What we didn’t know was whether gender would matter once you held all of these factors constant. Did knowing the gender of the author make other scholars cite an article more or less?

The results were striking. Even when we controlled for an enormous range of factors, gender remained one of the best predictors of how often an article would be cited. If you were female, your article would get about 0.7 cites for every 1 cite that a male author would receive.

This paper has garnered a lot of press here, here, and here, not because it’s telling us something we hadn’t already suspected but because the data are incontrovertible. Crunch the numbers in different ways and the results are always the same: articles written by women in IR are cited less than men, all else equal.

The authors of that study have some productive suggestions. One is anonymous review: publishers should mask out the authorship and affiliations when sending papers out for review. You’re judging the work on its own quality, right, so who wrote it shouldn’t matter. I do something similar when I’m grading papers — I refuse to look at the students’ names until I’ve evaluated the whole thing.

This would also diminish that other unfortunate bias, judging papers by what institution they came out of, rather than their content.

Another suggestion is simply to have first and middle names always reduced to initials. That’s not a perfect solution, but it helps. (It doesn’t help if you’re already known by your initials, but that’s a different problem.)

I have another suggestion: maybe graduate students should all get some kind of education in equality as part of their training, so they don’t go on to be bigoted asshats when they go on to full science careers. I’ve heard it all: prejudice against women, against blacks, against Asians, against historically black colleges, against liberal arts institutions. Maybe scientists should learn not to pay only lip service to that scientific virtue of objectivity.

More formulaic bullshit from Thunderf00t

Thunderf00t has a new video, and it’s the usual nonsense of bad metaphors and vague recommendations and a complete lack of empathy and reason — more mountain lions and wasps, and new comparisons that don’t work.

Here’s the problem I have: he keeps saying that women can do things to reduce their chances of getting raped…and then he trots out a fake equation, like this:

Probability of rape = AxBxCxDxExFxGxH

Where cyan are the factors women control, and red are the factors the rapists control. And therefore he’s only advocating that there are steps you can take to acceptably reduce your risk of rape, not that the rapist is excused.

Can I just say that I really, really despise fake equations? It’s a way to put up a pretense of scientific objectivity, without having to do any actual work in trying to understand the relationship of the variables. Why would you give all of these variables equal weight? Why would you think these are probabilities that are appropriately multiplied together? And most importantly, what the hell are the variables? I would think that one of the major objections here is that he leaves his variables unspecified, and if we think it through, it turns out that those parameters are what many of us are objecting to.

Later in his video, he mentions “body language” as a factor in rape (let’s call that his factor A) — apparently, women just have to learn the right body language to discourage rapists…like being waspish or lionish. I think. Looking fearful is apparently a bad thing — so ladies, if you get raped, perhaps it’s because you weren’t presenting yourself forcefully enough. But on the other hand, what I’ve seen is that if women are aggressively outgoing and bold, they get more hatred and accusations of being unladylike and death and rape threats. How’s that working out for Rebecca Watson?

So apparently A doesn’t scale in a simple linear way, and it isn’t even interpretable as a numeric value…and it’s going to have different context-dependent values, depending on the personality of your wanna-be rapist. So what exactly are women supposed to do?

I asked this question on the chat to the Magic Sandwich show, in which Thunderf00t tried to defend himself (which was awful, by the way: who thought it was a good idea to bring on four men to discuss how women should behave to avoid rape? Lilandra was the token woman, and they gave her very little time to speak). The answer: watch what they choose to wear (we’ll call that Factor B).

Again, we’re missing specifics. So women aren’t supposed to dress attractively? The whole world is sending women signals that they’re supposed to care about their appearance, and dress beautifully and apply makeup, and when men get together to mansplain how to avoid rape, their answer is…be less attractive. Right. So we’d expect that the male scale of feminine attractiveness is now equivalent to the scale of rapeability? What a damning relationship, if true…and of course it isn’t.

We’re still guessing at what factor C might be. Thunderf00t makes one of his typical clueless metaphors: that there’s something about women’s behavior that is like wearing a hardhat in a construction area. We have signs in such areas that warn people and tell them they must wear a hardhat, and we don’t get upset that it’s limiting people’s freedom to follow common sense rules.

So, I wonder, what is the hardhat equivalent for women’s behavior? What are they supposed to wear or do to protect themselves? Be specific. A construction site has specific risks — heavy falling objects — and a straightforward defensive measure — wearing a hardhat — to address the risks. Every woman in the world would love to know what simple defensive measure they can take to prevent all forms of rape.

Thunderf00t doesn’t have an answer to that. It’s all handwaving and invalid metaphors that break instantly upon inspection.

What he doesn’t address at all is the fundamental unfairness. Everyone, men, women, bosses, workers, wears a hardhat at a construction site. We don’t single out some group and say their heads are especially fragile so they need special protection. But we blithely assume that it is entirely reasonable to demand that women live with heightened risk.

My wife mentioned a simple example to me: she’d never walk into a parking garage alone late at night. And that’s a reasonable precaution she takes all the time. But think about it: if men had special reason to fear the security at a particular parking area, we’d be demanding more police patrols, greater video surveillance, that steps be taken to reduce the danger. But women? Heck, that’s just a consequence of their being the “weaker sex”, they need to adapt to deal with it.

Can you even image the reaction if people at a workplace were told that the company parking garage was risky, so you men need to partner up when you walk out to your car? Outrage and demands that the company fix the problem right now.

So Thunderf00t has invented an utterly useless pseudo-scientific formula to justify his views, and even the most casual analysis of possible factors to fit into it reveals that it simply cannot work, that it fits reality remarkably poorly, and that it is so sloppily defined that it is meaningless. I reject Thunderf00t’s ideas because they are appallingly bad science.