That isn’t how diversity works

Some people didn’t like Bill Nye’s appearance on “Dancing With The Stars”. That’s OK, maybe he’s not such a great dancer…oh, wait, they didn’t like it because it was bad for science? What?

Nye wore a lab coat while he and his partner did the chachacha to the song "Weird Science," while dancing through a set of life-sized beakers. Nye’s appearance on Dancing was so bad it has him facing elimination, after getting the lowest score in the bunch.

His dance did end with fans cheering his name, and he had the biggest social media buzz of any contestants.

But I think his over-the-top performance on "Dancing With The Stars" on Monday night was a disservice to the science community by reinforcing stereotypes that scientists are nerdy, old white men who can’t dance. These stereotypes are what keep women and minorities out of science.

Hang on a minute there. I’m all for more diversity in science, and think there should be more women and minorities in the game. That does not mean that we nerdy old white men have to go crawl into a closet somewhere. The idea is that more women and minorities can get opportunities to do science and get promoted within their disciplines, not that old white men have to stop dancing. I don’t even see the connection here: is it the stereotype that black men are better dancers? That women are prettier on the dance floor? That dancing has anything at all to do with success in a science career?

Bill Nye is a very famous science popularizer (that the audience was chanting his name is a good sign of what he has done for science), and he apparently also likes to dance. Unless he beat up or intimidated a better woman to earn that slot on the show, or some kind of silent discrimination kept a more worthy black scientist from getting a chance to hoof it on the dance floor, I say good for Bill Nye, and yes, nerdy old white men are still allowed to be scientists and to dance. And that’s good for science, because it humanizes the people who are doing science.

Also, I thought Nye was a pretty good dancer…maybe not the best ever, but far, far better than I am. Are we really going to oppose the stereotype that nerdy scientists can’t dance by telling them to not dance?

Why is it always the berries?

I presume this essay about how women make better programmers was intended as satire…but it fell flat for me. I am so tired of this cartoon version of human evolutionary history that emphasizes the dichotomized roles of men and women, built entirely on grossly oversimplified views about our ancestor’s lives and contrived to reinforce stereotypes. It doesn’t matter whether it’s done to bestow Science’s favor on male or female — it’s bad.

The roots of this division are sadly rooted in humanity’s pre-history. On the plains of our ancestors, male hunters roamed the savannah, chasing down prey, while women remained home to nurture families and gather berries. The males adapted for big movements and fast action, while the women adapted for slow, methodical searching. The traits that made women expert bug-huntresses in the dust have carried forward and given them an advantage at hunting bugs in code. Men simply aren’t adapted to that kind of patient searching. They live for the thrill of the chase.

We’re wandering in Ray Comfort territory here, with this conception of the two sexes evolving and adapting independently. I don’t know about you, but I had both a mother and a father, and they contributed equally to my genetics, and I have fathered both boy and girl children myself. There are differences between the sexes, of course, but to assume that the differential responses to a couple of steroid hormones is so finely tuned that it completely segregates social roles, no crossover capabilities possible, is absurd.

No one has evolved to program. Maybe that’s the point of the joke, but it never ceases to annoy to see biology mangled.

Like cattle

Christopher Jackson of Chandler, Arizona needs to be put away for a long, long time. He has some peculiar notions about how to interact with women.

The woman told police the two of them went to a baseball game together, and after the game, Jackson wanted to go dancing. The woman told Jackson she was too tired to do that. He "offered her a pill to energize her," according to court documents.

Not feeling energized after taking the pill, Jackson gave her two more. The woman passed out shortly after taking the other two pills, according to court documents.

She woke up in Jackson’s bed in severe pain, and discovered that Jackson had branded her. She said she saw Jackson with the branding equipment and butane torch, according to the documents.

The woman told police that Jackson "bragged" to her that he’d done that to other girlfriends in the past and explained to her that he wanted to do the same thing to her because "her vagina was his," court documents state.

How can a human being in 21st century America reach middle age while holding these indescribably vile attitudes? And he claims to have done this multiple times?

I think I’ll pass on This vs. That, too

Skepchick earlier reported on This vs. That, a poor man’s version of Mythbusters that was actually more like a reanimated version of the thankfully deceased Man Show. The creators have since turned to twitter in a manic campaign to get people to watch their awful show. Take a look at their feed — it’s spam city. I’m surprised it hasn’t been taken down already.

They sent me a couple of tweets offering a discount code and HUGE SAVINGS and urging me to watch their show. I turned them down, rudely, saying they were cheesy sexist shit. They replied.

@thisvsthatshow: @pzmyers I’m now aware you’re a cantankerous fuck. You’ll find my response to your baseless allegations, here: http://ow.ly/oMXXB

Hmmm. I find your approach enticing. Who’s in charge of your PR?

I did check out their response. It’s actually a reply to Phil Plait, who said exactly what I said, but much more politely, because he’s Phil Plait.

Thank you for the note. However, I have decided not to watch the show. I watched the trailers, and found them to be off-putting, to say the least. I know they were trying to be tongue-in-cheek, but the sexism in the trailers completelye dissuaded me from wanting to see the show. Also, the use of “booth babes” at Dragon Con (and the tweets promoting them) pretty much sealed the deal for me.

I have written several times about sexism – and sometimes outright misogyny – in the skeptical and scientific communities. I want to promote getting more young girls interested in these topic so they can grow up to be scientists, and not have to deal with institutional and cultural sexism. Given the way you promoted the show (as well as only having men as guests, apparently), I don’t see “This Vs That” as furthering this cause, and in fact would appear to impede it. For that reason, I won’t be promoting it.

That Phil. He’s a pretty good guy. Seeing his email is the only thing of worth in the This Vs. That reaction.

Hotchkiss’s (the creator of the show) response is complaining that he needs to parade around booth babes in skimpy outfits (with two of them wearing lab coats!) because it’s the only way to get his show noticed. He really wants to get more women in science.

But…when he lists his participants and advisors, they are all men. He has an excuse!

@thisvsthatshow: @futilityfiles We invited more than a dozen women scientists to appear on This vs That. ALL of them turned us down!

Yeah? I wonder why. Maybe we can see part of it in his twitter campaign.

@thisvsthatshow: @rickygervais Finally, a TV series that will help you get laid. Promise. http://ow.ly/oFWso

And he denies that he’s a sexist. Right. This is the approach that will get more women in science — tell the men that it will get them laid.

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This crap is everywhere

One question I got at my CFI-DC talk was about the prevalence of sexist/misogynistic scumbags in the atheist movement — aren’t they just a minority? And my answer was that I don’t know what percentage they are, but that it’s a mistake to dismiss it as a fringe phenomenon; it’s too common, and the people who are doing it aren’t some bizarre handicapped aberrant group, they’re people you wouldn’t look at twice if you saw them in the street. And some of them are your friends and family.

And then I get home to discover the latest misogynistic screw-up in the tech industry: a conference called TechCrunch which features presentations about quick hacks had a couple of, to put it generously, inappropriate presentations, including one called “Titstare”. This is the entirety of the talk.

Let me just say that not only was it grossly sexist, but it was unimaginative, uncreative, incompetently done, and terribly presented. These two guys ought to be deeply embarrassed to have thrown up such a pathetic joke on a public stage — even if it hadn’t been a sad attempt at a breast joke, it was a total failure.

These people are all over the place. There’s just something wrong with the culture.

My theory: boys are brought up with a lack of sexual responsibility. The aggressive aspect of male sexual behavior is celebrated and treated as entirely natural, and therefore excusable, while girls are brought up with all of the responsibilities. Crude sexual humor is an outlet or venting, rather than a mistake or exhibition of ineptitude.

You know that right now those two guys are back with their bros, who are not telling them, “you fucked up.” They are being told that bitches are crazy, women have no sense of humor, grim somber feminists are ruining everything because they hate men and don’t know how to laugh. All blame is being placed on women because men are not accountable for what their testicles make them do.

You know who else ought to be really outraged at that spectacle? Comedians. Because boys are also brought up to think the most stupid crap is hilarious, as long as it’s about getting sex (see also that crass young man who was yucking it up on camera about the Steubenville rape), and it really lowers our expectations for humor.

Homogamy?

A bakery in Gresham, Oregon that refused to sell a wedding cake to a lesbian couple has gone out of business. There is no explanation why — small businesses fail all the time, especially in this economy — but of course, everyone is guessing that they lost business thanks to their bigoted stand.

It would be nice to live in a world where everyone was so principled and knowledgeable that they’d avoid giving their custom to a business run by homophobes, but I don’t think we can credit that here. The article claims that all of the comments the bakery has received on their facebook page have been supportive; they also tied their denial of service to their religious principles, which is usually a successful strategy. Of course, Gresham is a Portland suburb, where weird culty religious attitudes that don’t involve organic food and saying “Namaste” don’t thrive so well.

It’s complicated. I think the most likely simple explanation is that stupid behavior is correlated with poor business practices, and multiple factors led to the business contracting. But guess who is convinced that it was the gays fault?

Vox Day, unsurprisingly.

So, we now know that in addition to being bad for marriage – in Britain a woman will soon no longer legally become a “wife” while in France women can no longer become “mothers” – we know that homogamy is bad for jobs and the economy. This is precisely why free association – or as its opponents call it, discrimination – is a Constitutional right.

It is a sign of considerable societal decline that such a fundamental human right is no longer recognized in the USA.

We don’t know that homosexuality is bad for jobs or the economy. I would think that discriminating against a substantial part of the workforce on the basis of anything other than efficiency would be sort of anti-capitalist and anti-libertarian, though, so I don’t understand why these far-right conservatives have anything to complain about. Except that it’s religious dogma.

What also irks me here though is that word, “homogamy”. This is another case of clueless twits appropriating a word because it sounds sciencey, and getting it wrong. Homogamy has a botanical sense: it refers to the timing of maturation of male and female reproductive organs. It also has a general meaning in reference to assortative mating: homogamous mating patterns are non-random mating relationships. You could say that my wife and I are homogamous, for instance, because we’re both of Western European and specifically Scandinavian stock — like most members of our society, the structure of social events promotes less diverse associations that are not accurately representative of the distribution of genotypes in the whole. We also tend to gravitate towards sexual relationships with people who “look like us”.

That’s homogamy. Using the term for biologically non-reproductive relationships like gay marriage is really, really stupid.

Oh, right, I already said this was from Vox Day.

I guess I’ll know who to vote for in the Australian elections, then

Oh, wait, I’m not a citizen, I don’t get to vote. But if I were a citizen, I know I could never vote for the Liberal party, because they put up billboards flyers like this:

billboardbaby

We just had a long fight over same-sex marriage in Minnesota (we won!), and the conservative thugs and liars who opposed it here never sunk quite that low. And really, now that gay couples are getting married all over the place, the landscape is not littered with tearful abandoned children.

And then there’s this guy Rudd from the Labor party who said this in a debate the other day:

Labor it is, then.

Although Rudd doesn’t seem to think things through. He does consult his “Christian conscience”, but doesn’t he realize that his riposte — that he’s no more compelled to oppose gay marriage because of a Biblical injunction than he is to support slavery because “the Bible also says slavery is a natural condition” — is a knife to the heart of the whole notion of the Bible as any kind of moral authority at all? I’d be happier with him if he’d consider the logical consequences and simply abandoned Christianity altogether.

He might as well. I bet that pastor who asked the question, and his congregation, all think the billboard above is lovely and are going to vote Liberal anyway.

Teaching while female

I’ve been here before. You care about your teaching, so you give the class a form asking for anonymous evaluations, with criticisms welcome…because you seriously want to hear what you can do to improve learning. And then there are always a few students who blow it off with stupid remarks and irrelevant ‘witticisms’ — I’ve been told the class needs more Jesus, for instance (I do not preach religion or atheism in my classroom).

But I’ve never had to face the special challenges of teaching while female.

Later that afternoon, I started going through the responses. It was encouraging to see that, in general, responses to the first two questions indicated I was getting better, which was gratifying given the amount of time and energy I spent re-developing the class. For the most part, students were surprisingly honest when responding to questions 3 and 4, showing they understood their responsibility in their progress, or lack thereof. Somewhere towards the end of the ~160 evaluations, I came across one that answered question #2 with: “Teach naked.”  I can’t tell you what the rest of this evaluation said; this is the only part I remember.  I was so angry, and embarrassed, and exasperated, and hopeless, all at once.  I worked so hard.  I am so knowledgeable.  I take such care to present myself professionally. I care deeply about my students’ learning outcomes, particularly with respect to learning critical thinking skills.  But none of that matters.  I clearly will never be more than a thing to look at.  How depressing is that?  None of my work, achievements, or intentions matter to people like that—just because I’m a woman, an object.  It’s maddening!

I can’t even imagine students sexualizing me, so I’d never had to think about how I’d handle such a problem. The Jesus thing? Easy. I just ignore it. But treating me as your own personal sex monkey? Never had to worry about it.

But now I know exactly how to respond to such an unlikely eventuality, and for those of you for whom it is far more likely, here’s an example of dealing with it strongly:

Almost two weeks later, before giving an exam, I announced to my class: “I want to take the first couple minutes to call out the person who used the anonymity of the mid-semester evaluations as an opportunity to sexually harass me.”  The class was suddenly at full attention.  You could hear a pin drop.  My voice trembled.  I felt humiliated having to admit that some people see me as an object.  I had decided not to make eye contact, so as to not implicitly accuse anyone, and instead stared towards the back.  I proceeded with increasing audible confidence:

“Now, I’m going to give you the benefit of doubt and assume this was not a malicious comment.  Now here’s where the teachable moment comes in: these types of comments, as well as things like catcalls, are not taken as compliments.  They constitute sexual harassment, which is a form of bullying, and like any bully, you are a coward.  An adult would own up to it and face the consequences.  For those of you who may have heard about it afterward and snickered, high-fived, or didn’t in any way condemn it publicly, you are complicit in condoning such cowardly behavior.  Now, here’s a good rule of thumb if you are unsure whether you are harassing or bullying someone—ask yourself: would you do or say this to your mother, sister, or eventually your daughters?  If the answer is no, then, it is inappropriate to do or say to a person you do not know very well.”

Bravo.

Hey, isn’t that a well-spoken truth even outside of the classroom?