Correcting the imbalance

This is a great short film that discusses the history of women in chemistry in Scotland, but it’s applicable to all of the sciences everywhere.

A telling quote: one chemist talks about how women were doing well but not getting promoted internally, so the well-meaning senior administrators tried to improve the situation by offering the women a course in how to get promoted.

To this day I still don’t understand how they didn’t realize it was them that needed the course.

(via Janet Stemwedel, who has a transcript.)

Fascinating logic

Manboobz finds an explanation for the shortage of women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. It’s because women are inferior, of course. It’s written by a guy going by the name “IHaveALargePenis”, which just screams academic authority.

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So what’s the problem for women? Many jobs require discipline and stamina.

Many fields have horrible deadlines and any person not finishing their work on time can slow an entire project and become the weakest link. When you’re holding up something that thousands of people are working on, relying on, etc and they’re all waiting for you, not fun. Additionally you’ll be pushed to do overtime, heavy overtime. When it comes to software development for example, in the last few months leading up to release, you’ll be better off bringing extra clothes and a sleeping bag to work. This can apply to virtually all other fields in different ways for different reasons.

OK, that’s nice. As someone who teaches in a STEM field, however, my experience has been that the women, in general, are more likely to be responsible and get their work done on time than men (this is a broad generalization, of course: some women are slackers, some men are meticulous and focused). Somehow IHaveALargePenis thinks the demands of a field predispose it to favor men, when I’d suggest the opposite is true.

But then, men must be just plain smarter than women?

Women and men study differently. Women are great and memorizing but don’t focus on understanding. This is why there’s a relatively equal amount of girls/boys in STEM the first year, but then it significantly favors the boys as time passes. The problem is that women do great on tests, but don’t bother to understand that knowledge, which is fairly important later on and everything you learn will be used in the future (as you move from first to 4th year). This is why girls have been doing better (or so it seems) ever since standardized tests.

Errm, I don’t do standardized tests. In fact, quite the opposite: as students progress from the multiple choice/short answer tests I give to first year students to their senior year, I rely increasingly on open-ended essay tests and take-home exams so that I can better evaluate their deeper understanding. Women do just fine on such exams. In fact, my upper level courses are packed with women, they’re always the majority, and when I look at my grade distributions, women sort out towards the top of the class.

I’m a little confused, though: IHaveALargePenis first claims that STEM curricula favor men over women, but that women are favored by the standardized tests he claims are in use. Which is it?

At this point, IHaveALargePenis’s neurons must have been exhausted, because he lapses into even more degenerate idiocy.

What exactly is there to attack? There’s 50% more women in college than men. Women have infiltrated every major out there outside of STEM. Do you know how HUGE STEM is? Let me tell you how huge it is. Go look up any non STEM focused University out there (MIT or Standord) and check the faculty for STEM or other majors. You’ll find out quickly that the entire STEM curriculum has fewer faculty than a single major like business.

So the source of his argument for the inferiority of women in STEM is basically that there are more men than women in the field, therefore women must have less aptitude. But now he claims that there are many more women in college than men (although I think his 50% is off; my university is a liberal arts college, which historically tends to attract more women, and we have roughly a 60:40 distribution of women:men). Doesn’t that imply by his own reasoning that women must be smarter than men?

I hate to inform IHaveALargePenis of a fact that might cause some shrinkage for him, but we also have more women than men in our biology and chemistry disciplines, although physics and math are still male-dominated; computer science here is interesting because we have more women than men on the faculty. The trends are all going in a way that IHaveALargePenis is going to find very uncomfortable: enrollments by women in STEM are going up, relatively. If I thought like IHaveALargePenis does, I’d have to conclude that men are dumber than women, and getting dumber year by year (fortunately, I don’t think like he does).

I don’t even understand his last point — it makes no sense at all. Since when are MIT and “Standord” [sic] non-STEM focused? What does the size of the faculty in different disciplines have to do with his issues? I can tell you that the math discipline at my university has more faculty than the psychology discipline does, but far fewer majors…and that’s because math has to teach service courses that provide classes to students across many disciplines.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more business than science faculty at some universities — business is a popular major. So? What does that have to do with the relative merits of men’s and women’s brains?

I’m afraid that IHaveALargePenis must learn to focus on understanding, rather than spewing words on a page. Perhaps the fact that he has a penis indicates that he also has some mental deficiencies? I’m going to give his paper an F.

Hit them where it hurts

Russia under Putin seems to be trying to return to the repressive ways of the Tsars. They have passed a law against “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations”, which is, plain and simple, an anti-gay law. Obama has canceled a planned meeting with Putin over this issue (or perhaps more likely, that Russia gave sanctuary to Snowden), and he’s also made a strong statement against it.

Saying that he had “no patience for countries that try to treat gays or lesbians or transgender persons in ways that intimidate them or are harmful to them,” Obama criticized a law, enacted in June, that prohibits public events promoting gay rights and public displays of affection by same-sex couples. A Russian official has promised that the law will be enforced during next February’s Sochi Games despite the International Olympic Committee’s contrary stance.

So Russia is planning to flout the Olympic Committee’s more egalitarian rules? Interesting. You know what we should do? Listen to Stephen Fry.

An absolute ban on the Russian Winter Olympics of 2014 on Sochi is simply essential. Stage them elsewhere in Utah, Lillyhammer, anywhere you like. At all costs Putin cannot be seen to have the approval of the civilised world.

He is making scapegoats of gay people, just as Hitler did Jews. He cannot be allowed to get away with it. I know whereof I speak. I have visited Russia, stood up to the political deputy who introduced the first of these laws, in his city of St Petersburg. I looked into the face of the man and, on camera, tried to reason with him, counter him, make him understand what he was doing. All I saw reflected back at me was what Hannah Arendt called, so memorably, “the banality of evil.” A stupid man, but like so many tyrants, one with an instinct of how to exploit a disaffected people by finding scapegoats. Putin may not be quite as oafish and stupid as Deputy Milonov but his instincts are the same. He may claim that the “values” of Russia are not the “values” of the West, but this is absolutely in opposition to Peter the Great’s philosophy, and against the hopes of millions of Russians, those not in the grip of that toxic mix of shaven headed thuggery and bigoted religion, those who are agonised by the rolling back of democracy and the formation of a new autocracy in the motherland that has suffered so much (and whose music, literature and drama, incidentally I love so passionately).

Yes. Shut them down in an arena where the impact on their prestige and their pocketbooks will actually make an impression.

Trying to overcome my Male Pattern Blindness

The latest furor over Ben Radford triggered some bad memories. Has anyone sat down and actually compiled a list of that guy’s offenses against reason and science? He’s got a long history of making a mess.

Remember when he was distorting the conclusions of papers about women’s eating disorders? Or how about the time he was taking issue with a four-year-old who notices the cultural biases in toys? That was fun; it led to Radford arguing that dolls are all pink because girls like pink because dolls are pink, and then inventing evo psych nonsense about color preferences and women searching for pink berries. Then he was dismissing concerns about the frequency of sexual harassment in schools, and picking nits over sexual assault so that he could argue that rape wasn’t so horribly frequent, a claim which revealed that he was innumerate.

Say…do you notice something? Is there a pattern to Radford’s biases? I mean, he’s well regarded otherwise, has a popular podcast, and I don’t think he’s stupid — the majority of the things he writes about are OK, it’s just that every once in a while he plumbs the depths of idiocy with a piece that makes him look like a hyperskeptical dishonest twit. And I think…if I look real hard…if I wipe the Y-chromosome bearing floaties out of my eyes…I see a common thread.

Whenever Radford writes about gender issues, like sexual assault, cultural assumptions about gender roles, or media biases about women, he turns into a lying hyperskeptical denialist. He stops being skeptical and starts digging for evidence, and worse, making up evidence, to bolster his presuppositions that discrimination against women doesn’t exist. He’s a bad skeptic. And he has a long history of doing this.

Why does he even have a job?

I don’t know if you want to read read Ron Lindsay’s explanation, but here it is anyway.

And what is it CFI was supposed to rebut? Ben’s speculations about the hues of dolls’ faces? Presumably not. What appeared to bother some commenters was Ben’s alleged sexism.

OK. CFI denounces sexism. We always have and presumably always will. Stereotyping based on gender is wrong and policies and practices that promote such stereotyping should be condemned. Furthermore, attitudes that exhibit sexism are unacceptable, and we should work to eliminate such attitudes, including, to the extent they exist, such attitudes within secular/skeptical organizations.

The problem is I doubt that Ben would disagree with anything in the above paragraph, nor did I see anything in his posts to suggest he would. Therefore, I’m not sure it counts as a “rebuttal.”

I love that blithe “OK”. Yeah, CFI denounces sexism, and Radford says he does, too, so what have you little people got to complain about?

But wait…I think I see another pattern emerging through my testosterone-addled murk. Look what Karen Stollznow said about her work environment — they have a history, too, of diminishing the significance of a pattern of behavior.

Five months after I lodged my complaint I received a letter that was riddled with legalese but acknowledged the guilt of this individual. They had found evidence of “inappropriate communications” and “inappropriate” conduct at conferences. However, they greatly reduced the severity of my claims. When I asked for clarification and a copy of the report they treated me like a nuisance. In response to my unanswered phone calls they sent a second letter that refused to allow me to view the report because they couldn’t release it to “the public”. They assured me they were disciplining the harasser but this turned out to be a mere slap on the wrist. He was suspended, while he was on vacation overseas. They offered no apology, that would be an admission of guilt, but they thanked me for bringing this serious matter to their attention. Then they asked me to not discuss this with anyone. This confidentiality served me at first; I wanted to retain my dignity and remain professional. Then I realized that they are trying to silence me, and this silence only keeps up appearances for them and protects the harasser.

Serial harassers are really, really good at looking wounded at accusations and apologizing verbally — they can be socially slick and glibly slide through these storms, because that’s what enables their activities. What you have to do is look at their patterns of behavior, what they do, not what they say. And Radford clearly has a sexist modus operandi.

Nice cartoon:

Also, Rebecca Watson has a few words.

Sikivu, Ophelia, and Rebecca — who says atheism lacks women stars?

I just watched our very own Sikivu Hutchinson and Ophelia Benson, along with Rebecca Watson, brilliantly discuss this silly question, “Are women afraid of atheism?” I think this embed code below will work, but who knows…it was through the Huffington Post, and they have to make everything weird and difficult.

There was also a concurrent text stream, and wouldn’t you know it, all the usual dudebros were there to complain that there is no problem, women are all equally represented, atheism has no cultural relevance anyway so why are these women talking?

No, it could never happen to her!

This is what always blows my mind: that sexual harassment affects people I’d never imagine having to worry about it. Karen Stollznow is a big name, popular on the skeptic conference circuit, and has always given the impression of being strong, poised, and confident — which means that I cluelessly took it for granted that no one would ever mess with her. I was wrong. This is never a problem with the victims, but always in the nature of the perpetrators.

Stollznow has opened up about her years of harassment at work, and it’s shocking. It’s the usual combination of shame and peer pressure that keeps women silent (exactly as the abusers like it), and when they reveal that ugly history one begins to get an awareness of how ubiquitous the problem is.

I know who her abuser was…and I feel a weird combination of being appalled and being totally unsurprised. It’s another of those big name skeptics, popular with some on the lecture circuit, and also (the totally unsurprising part) with a history of belittling women’s concerns. I’ve talked with Stollznow a bit about revealing that name, and I’m holding off a bit because she was very circumspect in that article…but I’m of two minds about it, because the other thing we see over and over is that it’s the women who have the courage to step out and speak and face the usual torrent of disparagement and dismissal, and the abusers who get the privilege of lurking in the shadows.

Something strange happened after I posted this. People started emailing me. They all said the same thing: they knew exactly who the harasser was, and they named him, and eerily, they all named exactly the same name, and they were all 100% on the money. I’m starting to believe in psychic powers.

The accused harasser was Ben Radford.

Wait. Maybe it’s not psychic powers, it’s privileged ignorance. Almost all of the people writing to me are women, and some of them also tell tales of their husbands or boyfriends not believing them at first.

Is there such a thing as Male Pattern Blindness?

Surely, sexism is dead and feminism superfluous

But these stories keep coming, and I don’t understand it; there are these mobs of people constantly telling me that feminism is a sham, that True Skeptics™ would apply their critical faculties to it and see that sexism is not a real problem, and that it’s all just a bunch of hypersensitive weepy ladies with a victimhood mentality. So how do we explain what happened when a student created a feminist society at Altringham Girls Grammar School?

I decided to set up a feminist society at my school, which has previously been named one of "the best schools in the country", to try to tackle these issues. However, this was more difficult than I imagined as my all-girls school was hesitant to allow the society. After a year-long struggle, the feminist society was finally ratified.

What I hadn’t anticipated on setting up the feminist society was a massive backlash from the boys in my wider peer circle. They took to Twitter and started a campaign of abuse against me. I was called a "feminist bitch", accused of "feeding [girls] bullshit", and in a particularly racist comment was told "all this feminism bull won’t stop uncle Sanjit from marrying you when you leave school".

Our feminist society was derided with retorts such as, "FemSoc, is that for real? #DPMO" [don’t piss me off] and every attempt we made to start a serious debate was met with responses such as "feminism and rape are both ridiculously tiring".

If it’s so tiring, why is the sap behind that comment making the effort to respond?

OK, that’s just dumb people being mocking and dismissive. But then it took the usual turn, and the boys started judging everything on the young women’s sexual potential.

The situation recently reached a crescendo when our feminist society decided to take part in a national project called Who Needs Feminism. We took photos of girls standing with a whiteboard on which they completed the sentence “I need feminism because…”, often delving into painful personal experiences to articulate why feminism was important to them.

When we posted these pictures online we were subject to a torrent of degrading and explicitly sexual comments.

We were told that our “militant vaginas” were “as dry as the Sahara desert”, girls who complained of sexual objectification in their photos were given ratings out of 10, details of the sex lives of some of the girls were posted beside their photos, and others were sent threatening messages warning them that things would soon “get personal”.

Boys will be boys, right? And adults will be contemptible enablers of vicious behavior. Look how the administrators of the school responded:

We, a group of 16-, 17- and 18-year-old girls, have made ourselves vulnerable by talking about our experiences of sexual and gender oppression only to elicit the wrath of our male peer group. Instead of our school taking action against such intimidating behaviour, it insisted that we remove the pictures. Without the support from our school, girls who had participated in the campaign were isolated, facing a great deal of verbal abuse with the full knowledge that there would be no repercussions for the perpetrators.

Gosh. I guess we can’t sit back and relax, misogyny beheaded and mounted as a trophy on our wall, just yet.

Maybe next week, you think?