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Weiye Loh

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: About that War on Science, Obama Edition Continued - 0 views

rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/...-on-science-obama-edition.html

Sex Pregnancy Contraceptive Science Politics

shared by Weiye Loh on 08 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • In a surprise move with election-year implications, the Obama administration’s top health official overruled her own drug regulators and stopped the Plan B morning-after pill from moving onto drugstore shelves next to the condoms.

    The decision by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius means the Plan B One-Step emergency contraceptive will remain behind pharmacy counters, as it is sold today — available without a prescription only to those 17 and older who can prove their age.

    The Food and Drug Administration was preparing to lift the age limit on Wednesday and allow younger teens, who today must get a prescription, to buy it without restriction. That would have made Plan B the nation’s first over-the-counter emergency contraceptive, a pill that can prevent pregnancy if taken soon enough after unprotected sex.

    But Sebelius intervened at the eleventh hour and overruled FDA, deciding that young girls shouldn’t be able to buy the pill on their own — especially since some girls as young as 11 are physically capable of bearing children.

    “It is common knowledge that there are significant cognitive and behavioral differences between older adolescent girls and the youngest girls of reproductive age,” Sebelius said. “I do not believe enough data were presented to support the application to make Plan B One-Step available over the counter for all girls of reproductive age.”
  • It was the latest twist in a nearly decade-long push for easier access to emergency contraception, and the development shocked women’s groups and maker Teva Pharmaceuticals, which had been gearing up for over-the-counter sales to begin by month’s end.

    “We are outraged that this administration has let politics trump science,” said Kirsten Moore of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, an advocacy group. “There is no rationale for this move.”

    “This decision is stunning. I had come to believe that the FDA would be allowed to make decisions based on science and the public’s health,” said Susan Wood of George Washington University, who served as the FDA’s top women’s health official until resigning in 2005 to protest delays in deciding Plan B’s fate. She said, “Sadly, once again, FDA has been over-ruled and not allowed to do its job.”

    But the decision pleased conservative critics of the proposal.

    “Take the politics out of it and it’s a decision that reflects the concerns that many parents in America have,” said Wendy Wright, an evangelical Christian activist who has helped lead the opposition to Plan B.
  • Weiye Loh on 08 Dec 11
     
    the decision is of course political and has been informed, but not dictated, by science. Expert opinion on safety is one, but only one, factor in the HHS decision. Setting a legal age-threshold for buying the morning-after pill is no different than setting a legal age threshold for buying alcohol.
Weiye Loh

Understanding current causes of women's underrepresentation in science - 0 views

www.pnas.org/...1014871108.abstract

Science Gender Stereotype Gender Equality

shared by Weiye Loh on 12 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 12 Sep 11
     
    Explanations for women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields of science often focus on sex discrimination in grant and manuscript reviewing, interviewing, and hiring. Claims that women scientists suffer discrimination in these arenas rest on a set of studies undergirding policies and programs aimed at remediation. More recent and robust empiricism, however, fails to support assertions of discrimination in these domains. To better understand women's underrepresentation in math-intensive fields and its causes, we reprise claims of discrimination and their evidentiary bases. Based on a review of the past 20 y of data, we suggest that some of these claims are no longer valid and, if uncritically accepted as current causes of women's lack of progress, can delay or prevent understanding of contemporary determinants of women's underrepresentation. We conclude that differential gendered outcomes in the real world result from differences in resources attributable to choices, whether free or constrained, and that such choices could be influenced and better informed through education if resources were so directed. Thus, the ongoing focus on sex discrimination in reviewing, interviewing, and hiring represents costly, misplaced effort: Society is engaged in the present in solving problems of the past, rather than in addressing meaningful limitations deterring women's participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers today. Addressing today's causes of underrepresentation requires focusing on education and policy changes that will make institutions responsive to differing biological realities of the sexes. Finally, we suggest potential avenues of intervention to increase gender fairness that accord with current, as opposed to historical, findings.
Weiye Loh

What Gender Is Science? » Contexts - 0 views

contexts.org/...what-gender-is-science

Gender Gender Equality Gender Stereotype Science Discrimination

shared by Weiye Loh on 05 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • In labor markets, one well-known cause of sex segregation is discrimination, which can occur openly and directly or through more subtle, systemic processes
  • Sociologists and economists have documented this cognitive bias and “statistical discrimination” through diverse experiments. It turns out that people’s beliefs about men’s and women’s different natures lead them to assess task performance accordingly, even in the absence of any actual performance differences.
  • But discrimination isn’t the whole story. It’s well-established that girls and young women often avoid mathematically-intensive fields in favor of pursuits regarded as more human-centered. Analyses of gender-differentiated choices are controversial among scholars because this line of inquiry seems to divert attention away from structural and cultural causes of inequalities in pay and status.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Acknowledging gender-differentiated educational and career preferences, though, doesn’t “blame the victim” unless preferences and choices are considered in isolation from the social contexts in which they emerge.
  • Female representation in science programs is weakest in the Netherlands and strongest in Iran, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, and Oman, where science is disproportionately female. Although the Netherlands has long been considered a gender-traditional society in the European context, most people would still be intrigued to learn that women’s representation among science graduates is nearly 50 percentage points lower there than in many Muslim countries.

  • “Science” is a big, heterogeneous category, and life science, physical science, mathematics, and computing are fields with very different gender compositions. For example, women made up 60 percent of American biology graduates , but only about 19 percent of computing graduates, in 2008, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.

    But even when fields are defined more precisely, countries differ in some unexpected ways. A case in point is computer science in Malaysia and the U.S. While American computer scientists are depicted as male hackers and geeks, computer science in Malaysia is deemed well-suited for women because it’s seen as theoretical (not physical) and it takes place almost exclusively in offices (thought to be woman-friendly spaces).

  • Between 2005 and 2008, countries with the most male-dominated engineering programs include the world’s leading industrial democracies (Japan, Switzerland, Germany, and the U.S.) along with some of the same oil-rich Middle Eastern countries in which women are so well-represented among science graduates (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates).
  • One female student reported, “…In chemical engineering, most of the time you work in labs… So I think it’s quite suitable for females also. But for civil engineering… we have to go to the site and check out the constructions.”
  • Women’s relatively weak presence in STEM fields in the U.S. is partly attributable to some economic, institutional, and cultural features that are common to affluent Western democracies. One such feature is a great diversity of educational and occupational pathways.
  • In countries with developing and transitional economies, though, policies have been driven more by concerns about advancing economic development than by interests in accommodating women’s presumed affinities. Acute shortages of educated workers prompted early efforts by governments and development agencies to increase the supply of STEM workers.
  • Another reason for stronger sex segregation of STEM in affluent countries may be that more people (girls and women in particular) can afford to indulge tastes for less lucrative care and social service work in these contexts.
  • the argument that women’s preferences and choices are partly responsible for sex segregation doesn’t require that preferences are innate. Career aspirations are influenced by beliefs about ourselves (What am I good at and what will I enjoy doing?), beliefs about others (What will they think of me and how will they respond to my choices?), and beliefs about the purpose of educational and occupational activities (How do I decide what field to pursue?). And these beliefs are part of our cultural heritage. Sex segregation is an especially resilient form of inequality because people so ardently believe in, enact, and celebrate cultural stereotypes about gender difference.
  • While the vast majority of Americans today believe women should have equal social and legal rights, they also believe men and women are very different, and they believe innate differences cause them to freely choose distinctly masculine or feminine life paths. For instance, women and men are expected to choose careers that allow them to utilize their hard-wired interests in working with people and things, respectively.
  • Recent sociological research provides strong evidence that cultural stereotypes about gender difference shape individuals’ beliefs about their own competencies (“self-assessments”) and influence behavior in stereotype-consistent directions. Ubiquitous cultural depictions of STEM as intrinsically male reduce girls’ interest in technical fields by defining related tasks as beyond most women’s competency and as generally unenjoyable for them. STEM avoidance is a likely outcome.
  • Whatever one believes about innate gender difference, it’s difficult to deny that men and women often behave differently and make different choices. Partly, this reflects inculcation of gender-typed preferences and abilities during early childhood. This “gender socialization” occurs through direct observation of same-sex role models, through repeated positive or negative sanctioning of gender-conforming or nonconforming behavior, and through assimilation of diffuse cultural messages about what males and females like and are good at.
  • Sociologists who study the operation of gender in social interactions have argued that people expect to be judged according to prevailing standards of masculinity or femininity. This expectation often leads them to engage in behavior that reproduces the gender order. This “doing gender” framework goes beyond socialization because it doesn’t require that gender-conforming dispositions are internalized at an early age, just that people know others will likely hold them accountable to conventional beliefs about hard-wired gender differences.
  • Parents and educators exhort young people, perhaps girls in particular, to “follow their passions” and realize their “true selves.” Because gender is such a central axis of individual identity, American girls who aim to “study what they love” are unlikely to consider male-labeled science, engineering, or technical fields, despite the material security provided by such degrees.
  • Although the so-called “postmaterialist” values of individualism and self-expression are spreading globally, they are most prominent in affluent late-modern societies. Curricular and career choices become more than practical economic decisions in these contexts; they also represent acts of identity construction and self-affirmation
  • historical evidence pointing to long-term historical shifts in the gender-labeling of some STEM fields. In The Science Education of American Girls, Kim Tolley reports that it was girls who were overrepresented among students of physics, astronomy, chemistry, and natural science in 19th century American schools. Middle-class boys dominated the higher-status classical humanities programs thought to require top rational powers and required for university admission.
  • Science education was regarded as excellent preparation for motherhood, social work, and teaching. Sociologist Katharine Donato tells a similar story about the dawn of American computer programming. Considered functionally analogous to clerical work, it was performed mostly by college-educated women with science or math backgrounds. This changed starting in the 1950s, when the occupation became attractive to men as a growing, intellectually demanding, and potentially lucrative field. The sex segregation of American STEM fields—especially engineering, computer science, and the physical sciences—has shown remarkable stability since about 1980.
  • The gender (and racial) composition of fields is strongly influenced by the economic and social circumstances that prevail at the time of their initial emergence or expansion.
  • Tolley, for example, links men’s growing dominance of science education in the late 19th and early 20th century to changing university admissions requirements, the rapid growth and professionalization of science and technology occupations, and recurrent ideological backlashes against female employment.
  • When occupations or fields are segregated by sex, most people ­suspect it reflects fields’ inherently masculine or feminine task ­content. But this presumption is belied by substantial cross-national variability in the gender composition of fields, STEM in particular. Moreover, this variability follows surprising patterns. Whereas most people would expect to find many more female engineers in the U.S. and Sweden than in Columbia and Bulgaria, new data suggest that precisely the opposite is true.
  • Ironically, the freedom of choice that’s so celebrated in affluent Western democracies seems to help construct and give agency to stereotypically gendered “selves.” Self-segregation of careers may occur because some believe they’re naturally good at gender-conforming activities (attempting to build on their strengths), because they believe that certain fields will be seen as appropriate for people like them (“doing” gender), or because they believe they’ll enjoy gender-conforming fields more than gender-nonconforming ones (realizing their “true selves”). It’s just that, by encouraging individual self-expression in postmaterialist societies, we may also effectively promote the development and expression of culturally gendered selves.
  • Weiye Loh on 05 Jul 11
     
    Science education was regarded as excellent preparation for motherhood, social work, and teaching.
Weiye Loh

Gifts of Speech - Camille Paglia - 0 views

gos.sbc.edu/paglia.html

Academia Liberal Conservative Feminism Science Nature Rape Victim

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Jun 11 - Cached
  • if people are trying to critique from within the academic establishment, and they're getting tarred with the word "neoconservative," you keep on doing that long enough, people will get used to hearing it about themselves, and they will become conservative
  • a lot of people have been driven toward the neoconservative side by the failure of the liberal academic establishment to critique itself. So rather than blaming The New Criterion or Roger Kimball for all the problems of the world, it's time for the liberals of academe to critique themselves, to reform it from within.
  • my career has been a disaster. And before my book was finally published at Yale Press, it was rejected by seven New York publishers, I could not get published throughout the Seventies and Eighties, I was completely poor. For the first time in my adult life I'm out of debt as of three months ago. I've been on the unemployment line. I have taught in factories. I'm probably the only major voice right now in academe who's actually taught factory workers. As opposed to these people who are the Marxists [makes prancing, dancing, hair-preening gestures], oh yes, these Marxists, like Terry Eagleton at Oxford. Do you know what he makes? Do you know the salary that man makes? Oh, it just disgusts me. This is why he has to wear blue jeans, to show, "Oh, no, I don't have the money." These people are hypocrites! They really are. It's all a literary game. There's no authentic self-sacrifice, no direct actual experience of workers or working-class people. It's appalling, the situation. It's everywhere, it's everywhere in the Ivy League.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • You know, I'm really happy there wasn't all this talk about sex changes back then, since I probably would have gotten this fantasy that I was a man born wrongly in a woman's body, and I think I might very well have become obsessed with the idea of a sex change, which would have been a terrible mistake. Because I think I absolutely am a woman, but I was just a woman born ahead of my time. I was a kind of pioneer, and decade by decade I've acclimated myself to my sex role--thanks to my friendships with gay men and drag queens! Drag queens have influenced me enormously. Their analysis of the mythology of male and female, and the theatre of gender and so on,
  • My sense of time-frame is so vast compared to that of people in English departments. When I think about sex, when I think about anything in culture, I'm thinking about a 10,000-year time span, you see, and this is what causes a communication problem with feminists, because most of them, as far as I can see, tend to have their specialties in the late eighteenth century or following. There are a few who have training earlier, but they tend to be very narrowly focused even in that one area. I think my broad expanse of learning and my already world-consciousness
  • There was a point where feminism and I agreed. I was thirteen though. It was 1960, okay? That was a time when I said, "Men are terrible. The sexes are the same. Men must change. Society must change. And all the problems between the sexes are coming from the fact that men are so awful."
  • That's an unevolved position. It's thirty years later, girls! Let us move on! Oh, God! So I continued studying and, at this point, I became notorious in Syracuse, New York, where I was going to high school, for my Amelia Earhart obsession. The newspaper actually reported this. For three years--this looks forward to Sexual Personae--for three years, I did this Amelia Earhart research. The biographer of Amelia Earhart told me I had done more research in the primary sources than he had! I spent every Saturday in the bowels of the public library going through all these materials, old magazines and newspapers, before microfilm. Everything was falling to pieces. I probably destroyed the whole collection! I was covered with grime. Amelia Earhart to me was an image of everything a woman should be. It remains that for me. Amelia Earhart, my obsession. She is woman alone. Not woman hand-holding in a group and whining about men. Woman alone! Okay, all right? Woman goes up in a plane. If she crashes, she doesn't go, "You men did this to me!" She knows that she is responsible. It's her skill, her preparation. And then nature. Something that's not in her control can be her opponent: nature!
  • No one wants to talk about nature now. Meanwhile, the entire student population of the world is thinking about nature, the environment, they're thinking globally, but our faculty are off in their little corners talking about social constructionism. They haven't thought about nature in twenty years, okay, they are so behind. You mention the mere word "nature"--"Essentialism!" That's it. What--? I mean--! The thing about the Sixties is that we had a comprehensive world-view. We saw the injustices of society, and we wanted to remedy them. We focused our negative energy against society to change it. At the same time we saw the enormity of nature. And we honored the enormity of nature. It is appalling, the situation now, that you could think about talking about sex without thinking about nature. That you could claim that you are an expert in gender without knowing about hormones!
  • The contempt for science that's going on among humanists is contemptible.
  • It's this combination of the sciences plus the arts. "Impossible," you say, today? "Impossible--we're too specialized for that, we're too expert." No, this is exactly what we need. We have to bring this back, this idea of all of culture integrated. This is what we must do for the next generation of students. We must do this. We must make radical reforms of undergraduate and graduate education, to give students this kind of comprehensive vision of culture.
  • . When you destroy young people's ability to take pleasure in beauty, you are a pervert! So I stood up, I was very agitated--and she was such a good sport. I mean, here was this maniac she never heard of, my book had just come out, and I was waving my arms around. I said I didn't mean to condemn her, because I understood that what she was doing was the result of ten years of feminists doing this. But nevertheless, I asked, why is it, why is it that feminists have so much trouble dealing with beauty and pleasure, I said, to which gay men have made such outstanding cultural contributions? Why--if gay men can respond? This is why I get along so well with gay men, and I don't get along with lesbian feminists. This is why my sexuality is a complete neuter! I don't fit in anywhere! I'm like this wandering being, the Ancient Mariner--it's just awful.
  • You cannot just suddenly open a magazine and look at a picture of a nude woman and then free associate, using Lacan. You cannot do that! Because fashion magazines are part of the history of art. These are great photographers, great stylists--and gay men have made enormous contributions to fashion photography. Anyway, I made a huge statement that night--the whole audience gasped. I went, "The history of fashion photography from 1950 to 1990 is one of the great moments in the history of art!" And everyone went, "How can you say that?" Because obviously fashion is an oppression of women.
  • And beauty, according to, um, Miss, um, Naomi Wolf, is a heterosexist conspiracy by men in a room to keep feminism back
  • We had this huge fight about the song "Under My Thumb." I said it was a great song, not only a great song but I said it was a work of art. And these feminists of the New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Band went into a rage, surrounded me, practically spat in my face, literally my back was to the wall. They're screaming in my face, "Art? Art? Nothing that demeans women can be art!" There it is. There it is! Right from the start. The fascism of the contemporary women's movement.
  • What I identify with is the prewar feminism of Amelia Earhart, of Katherine Hepburn--who had an enormous impact on me--that period of women where you had independence, self-reliance, personal responsibility, and not blaming other people for your problems.
  • I don't feel less because I'm in the presence of a beautiful person. I don't go [imitates crying and dabbing tears], "Oh, I'll never be that beautiful!" What a ridiculous attitude to take!--the Naomi Wolf attitude. When men look at sports, when they look at football, the don't go [crying], "Oh, I'll never be that fast, I'll never be that strong!" When people look at Michelangelo's David, do they commit suicide? No. See what I mean? When you see a strong person, a fast person, you go, "Wow! That is fabulous." When you see a beautiful person: "How beautiful." That's what I'm bringing back to feminism. You go, "What a beautiful person, what a beautiful man, what a beautiful woman, what beautiful hair, what beautiful boobs!"
  • We should not have to apologize for reveling in beauty. Beauty is an eternal human value. It was not a trick invented by nasty men in a room someplace on Madison Avenue.
  • I say in Sexual Personae that it was invented in Egypt. For 3,000 years at the height of African civilization you had a culture based on beauty. We have two major cultures in the world today, France and Japan, organized around the idea of beauty. It is so provincial, feminism's problem with beauty. We have got to get over this.
  • Obviously, any addiction--like if you're addicted to plastic surgery--that's a problem. Of course it's a problem. Addiction to anything is a problem. But this blaming anorexia on the media--this is Naomi's thing--oh please! Anorexia is coming out of these white families, these pushy, perfectionist white families, who all end up with their daughters at Yale.
  • All this "Let's unmask Big Daddy"--this obsession with the weaknesses of big figures. This is infantile. It's infantile. You read major figures not because everything they say is the gospel truth but because they expand your imagination, they expand your I.Q., okay, they open up brain cells you didn't even know you have.
  • a politics which blames all human problems on white male imperialists who have victimized women and people of color. This view of history is coming from people who know nothing about history. Because when you think of the word "imperialist," if you automatically just think "America," then you don't know anything. Because someone who's studied the history of ancient Egypt knows that imperialism was practically invented in Egypt and in the ancient Near East. If you want to talk about imperialism, let's talk about Japan or Persia or all kinds of things. It's not just a white male monopoly.
  • we cannot have this scenario being projected of male rapaciousness and brutality and female victimage. We have got to make women realize they are responsible, that sexuality is something that belongs to them. They have an enormous power in their sexuality. It's up to them to use it correctly and to be wise about where they go and what they do. And I'm accused of being "anti-woman" because of this attitude
  • people say to me, "Oh, you're always talking about feminists as if they're monolithic. We're not monolithic. We're very pluralistic. We have so many different views." No, excuse me: the date-rape issue shows that I am correct. Because there is one voice speaking about date rape from coast to coast, one voice, one stupid, shrewish, puritanical, sermonizing, hysterical voice. And where are all these sophisticated feminists supposedly out there? Where are they? Totally impotent, locked in their little burrows wherever they are, whether they're in the East Village or Harvard. Wherever they are, they're impotent. There's not one voice raised to bring some sense into this hysteria. Now, I am an experienced teacher. I sympathize with the problems of freshmen, and so I believe that date-rape awareness is an excellent thing to do when students arrive, not only for the men, to warn the men that breaches of civilized behavior will not be tolerated, but also to warn the women, because unfortunately to me what's happening is that we have a white middle-class problem. I don't notice so many Hispanic women and African-American women going around and carrying on like this.
  • The girl has met the guy once before, this is the second time she met him, they were at a party, she invites him back to her room, its three A.M., she falls asleep, and then suddenly something happens, and she charges him with rape.
  • We cannot have this, these white middle-class girls coming out of pampered homes, expecting to do whatever they want. They don't understand what's going on, that there's a sexual content to their behavior, that maybe there's a subliminal sexuality, a provocativeness in their behavior. "Don't say 'provocative'! Because then you're blaming the victim!" Well, women will never be taken seriously until they accept full responsibility for their sexuality.
  • the sexual ideology of current feminism is reactionary and repressive and puritanical and phobic. And it's being produced by many of these women who have succeeded, you see, in the women's studies programs and who don't understand the degree to which their own careerism, their own opportunism is enwrapped with these ideas. They don't understand. They're not sophisticated women, many of them. They're not. They're not cosmopolitan women. To talk about sex, you have to know about literature and art. Literature and art are the best way into the psychology of mankind, because of the ambiguity and mystery. Because that is where you feel the flux, the flux of our sexual desire, the way our spirit is not in these rigid categories of oppressor and victim. Everything is flowing. Fantasy and imagination and all these things, they're always flowing. That's why Freud has been so useful for me, because of the way he is able to study the dream process and to find words to articulate these ambiguous nonverbal phenomena. It's a very, very good exercise for anyone trying to talk about sex. So the present situation is just appalling--just appalling. The language that is being used by these people, the way social-welfare issues have taken over the agenda. We cannot have this.
  • what's so ridiculous about this is that these people want "multiculturalism," they want to talk about various ethnic groups. At the same time they want to deny there's any difference between those ethnic groups.
Weiye Loh

Wiccans and Mystical Women: How New Age is Secretly Bad for Feminism « Skepti... - 0 views

www.skepticnorth.com/...e-is-secretly-bad-for-feminism

Feminism Religion Gender Stereotype Gender Equality Science Rationality

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 May 11 - No Cached
  • I find New Age thought, like Wicca, so much more aggravating than your average brand of magical thinking. Wicca tends to target itself to women followers. There’s a sense of female empowerment in its imagery of motherhood of Earth goddesses, mystical priestesses and the romanticizing of witch-hunt horror stories, used to symbolize the feared and misunderstood magick power of woman kind. It’s a type of magical thinking which lends itself well to taking advantage of those who may indeed feel powerless, unheard, and unseen, providing them with a way to artificially inflate a sense of self-worth using cheap parlour tricks.
  • The idea that women have a special inner power which grants them privileged knowledge about reality is damaging to the female image. It’s a giant step backward from the reality that men and women are equal in ability to the absurdity that women need supernatural power in order to bring themselves to the same level as ordinary men.
  • Typically, for a girl or woman character to play a significant role in a story (beyond being simply the love interest) she usually has to be one of two things: a) completely masculine in character or b) have extraordinary/supernatural abilities. This isn’t the case for male characters, who can be completely average and ordinary (even flawed or incompetent) heroes.
  • Weiye Loh on 30 May 11
     
    As advocates of science-based thinking, we need to promote the fact that women are just as logical and capable thinkers and doers as men, not just because it's true, but because it's our only defence against the kind of mysticism which preys on the insecurities of women and reinforces stereotypes. What the myth of women's intuition is really telling us is that women need to elevate themselves to the status of deities just to compete with the abilities of mortal men.
Weiye Loh

What the New York Times' John Tierney gets wrong about bias and women scientists. - By ... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...all

Gender Equality Science Academic Research Discrimination

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.
  • These experiments, and others like them, have been done. They are described in the PNAS article and the results are clear. Even in fields that are traditionally considered friendly to women, such as psychology and sociology, a woman's name leads to a lower ranking. As Ceci and Williams say, it is extremely unlikely that this bias is limited to the specific fields that were studied in these experiments. If you want to answer the scientific question of whether there is unconscious bias and discrimination against women, these experimental studies are the gold standard.
  • But there is another, trickier question to ask. How does this kind of discrimination actually influence the success of women scientists? That's much harder to determine, because you can't experimentally control all the other factors that shape a person's career. Instead of doing an experiment, the best you can do is to analyze the correlations between different factors, and that's much more problematic.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Ceci and Williams try to answer this question by analyzing the correlational data, and they come to an interesting and important conclusion. You might think that the bias that shows up in the résumé experiments would also show up directly in the correlational data—that journals, granting agencies, and academic departments would simply reject women at higher rates, and that this would lead women to be less successful. Ceci and Williams show that while this may have been true in the past, nowadays the relationship among gender, bias, and success is more complicated and indirect. In particular, they argue that women fail today primarily because of the resources that are available to them and the choices they make (or are led or forced to make) early in their careers, rather than because of the way they are judged later on.
  • Correlational analyses are tricky, however. To start out, you might ask whether there is a correlation between sex and scientific success. In fact, there is: Overall, women are less likely to be successful scientists than men.
  • But the difficulty, as every first year statistics course will tell you, is that correlation does not imply causation.
  • One approach to these problems is to try to untangle confounding causes using various statistical methods. But this approach is also complicated. For example, suppose you discover that there is a correlation between poverty and ill health, but this correlation disappears when you factor in health care and nutrition. The few poor people with high-quality health care and nutrition are as healthy as rich people—it's just that hardly any poor people have these advantages. It would be wrong to conclude from this that poverty has no causal influence on health. The right conclusion would be that poverty causes bad health care and poor nutrition, which cause ill health.
  • Ceci and Williams did not show, or claim to show, that there was no discrimination or unconscious bias against women scientists. Instead, they tried to untangle the complicated causal factors that influence success. They found that when you factor in women's circumstances—for example, what kinds of teaching loads they have, whether they are at research universities, whether they have young children, and so on—then the correlation between sex and success goes away.
  • Overall, female scientists have fewer resources than male scientists, just as poor people have less access to health care. But if you compare male and female scientists with identical resources you find that the women are just as likely to be successful. Ceci and Williams put it this way in their discussion of the number of journal articles women published: "The primary factor affecting women's productivity was structural position. When type of institution, teaching load, funding, and research assistance were factored in, the productivity gap completely disappeared (which is not to say discrimination has not influenced these factors in the real world)."
  • Concluding from this that gender doesn't influence scientific success, however, would be like concluding that poverty doesn't influence health in the study I described before. It's much more likely that gender causes the unequal resources, which causes the different outcomes
  • How can you reconcile the experimental résumé studies with the fact that women with as many resources as men have their papers, grants, and job applications accepted at equal rates? There are lots of possibilities. Women, knowing that they are subject to discrimination, may work twice as hard to produce high-quality grants and papers, so that the high quality offsets the influence of discrimination, just like HDL and LDL cholesterol. Even more likely, the kind of conscious efforts to overcome bias that Tierney dismisses may actually be working, thus offsetting unconscious discrimination.
  • Why does gender lead to unequal resources? Ceci and Williams accurately paint the big picture. Women drop out in ever greater numbers as they advance along the academic pipeline that leads from graduate school to first job and beyond. They often settle in jobs at lower tier schools with fewer resources and fail to even apply for publications, grants, or the best jobs at the best universities. Perhaps these women are simply choosing to have fewer resources. Or perhaps they want to have children. Ceci and Williams cite several studies showing that the conflict between female fertility and the typical tenure process is one important factor in women's access to resources. You could say that universities don't discriminate against women, they just discriminate against people whose fertility declines rapidly after 35.
  • But as Ceci and Williams admit, the unquestionable fact of unconscious bias, as revealed in the experimental résumé studies, is another possible reason women make choices that lead them to end up with fewer resources. Those studies show that women are subject to bias from the very start of their careers. Is it any wonder that many of them, keenly aware that their efforts are being downgraded compared to those of men, would withdraw from a competition that is systematically unfair?
  • This tension between experimental studies and correlational ones is not uncommon in science, but the rule is that experiments win.
  • the experiments prove that there is bias against women—and the correlational data suggest that this bias interacts with other factors in complicated ways to influence their success. Science reporters are supposed to understand these complexities and explain them to their readers—not claim, in spite of the evidence, that sex discrimination is a figment of the biased liberal
Weiye Loh

What the New York Times' John Tierney gets wrong about bias and women scientists. - By ... - 0 views

www.slate.com/2285355

Gender Equality Science Academic Research Discrimination

shared by Weiye Loh on 20 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • In order to understand why, we need to revisit some basic facts about the scientific method. The best scientific way to discover if one factor influences another is to do a controlled experiment.
  • These experiments, and others like them, have been done. They are described in the PNAS article and the results are clear. Even in fields that are traditionally considered friendly to women, such as psychology and sociology, a woman's name leads to a lower ranking. As Ceci and Williams say, it is extremely unlikely that this bias is limited to the specific fields that were studied in these experiments. If you want to answer the scientific question of whether there is unconscious bias and discrimination against women, these experimental studies are the gold standard.
  • But there is another, trickier question to ask. How does this kind of discrimination actually influence the success of women scientists? That's much harder to determine, because you can't experimentally control all the other factors that shape a person's career. Instead of doing an experiment, the best you can do is to analyze the correlations between different factors, and that's much more problematic.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Ceci and Williams try to answer this question by analyzing the correlational data, and they come to an interesting and important conclusion. You might think that the bias that shows up in the résumé experiments would also show up directly in the correlational data—that journals, granting agencies, and academic departments would simply reject women at higher rates, and that this would lead women to be less successful. Ceci and Williams show that while this may have been true in the past, nowadays the relationship among gender, bias, and success is more complicated and indirect. In particular, they argue that women fail today primarily because of the resources that are available to them and the choices they make (or are led or forced to make) early in their careers, rather than because of the way they are judged later on.
Weiye Loh

Glass ceiling in the lab | Society | Times Crest - 0 views

www.timescrest.com/...glass-ceiling-in-the-lab-4950

Gender Equality Science Academic Research

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Sohonie's defiance opened up the doors of the hallowed IISc to three other brilliant women in the following decade: Lalitha Chandrashekhar, who chose to give up her budding career to support her husband who was the iconic astrophysicist;Anna Mani, who became a distinguished metereologist, and Sunanda Bai, who committed suicide for reasons that remain a mystery to this day.

    "Neither Anna Mani nor Sunanda Bai were ever granted a doctoral degree.
Weiye Loh

'Women don't get quiet mental space' | Society | Times Crest - 0 views

www.timescrest.com/...nt-get-quiet-mental-space-4951

Gender Equality Science Academic Research

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Why is the glass ceiling so tough in sciences?
    It is a highly competitive job that asks for long hours and years. You are normally past 25 when you qualify for a job. By the time you are in your early to mid-40 s you are married, probably have children. This is also the age when you could be up for top posts. But most women in this age group don't have the luxury of that quiet mental space which is so necessary for scientists to be more productive. They don't have time to hob-nob with colleagues, others in the fraternity. With this kind of a profile, a woman candidate for a directorship or a top award is quite likely to be bypassed.

    Are behavioural issues a problem in labs?
    Some men don't even want to engage eye to eye with women.
Weiye Loh

Studying the politics of online science « through the looking glass - 0 views

alicerosebell.wordpress.com/...the-politics-of-online-science

Online Science Blog Gender

shared by Weiye Loh on 30 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Mendick, H. and Moreau, M. (2010). Monitoring the presence and representation of  women in SET occupations in UK based online media. Bradford: The UKRC.
  • Mendick and Moreau considered the representation of women on eight ‘SET’ (science, engineering and technology) websites: New Scientist, Bad Science, the Science Museum, the Natural History Museum, Neuroskeptic, Science: So What, Watt’s Up With That and RichardDawkins.net. They also monitored SET content across eight more general sites: the BBC, Channel 4, Sky, the Guardian, the Daily Mail, Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter.
  • Their results suggest online science informational content is male dominated in that far more men than women are present. On some websites, they found no SET women. All of the 14 people in SET identified on the sampled pages of the RichardDawkins.net website were men, and so were all 29 of those mentioned on the sampled pages of the Channel 4 website (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 11).
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • They found less hyperlinking of women’s than men’s names (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 7). Personally, I’d have really liked some detail as to how they came up with this, and what constituted ‘hyperlinking of women’s names’ precisely. It’s potentially an interesting finding, but I can’t quite get a grip on what they are saying.
  • They also note that the women that did appear, they were often peripheral to the main story, or ‘subject to muting’ (i.e. seen but not heard). They also noted many instances where women were pictured but remain anonymous, as if there are used to illustrate a piece – for ‘ornamental’ purposes – and give the example of the wikipedia entry on scientists, which includes a picture a women as an example, but stress she is anonymous (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 12).
  • Echoing findings of earlier research on science in the media (e.g. the Bimbo or Boffin paper), they noted that women, when represented, tended to be associated with ‘feminine’ attributes and activities, demonstrating empathy with children and animals, etc. They also noted a clustering in specific fields. For example, in the pages they’d sampled of the Guardian, they found seven mentions of women scientists compared with twenty-eight of men, and three of the these women were in a single article, about Jane Goodall (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 12-13).
  • The women presented were often discussed in terms of appearance, personality, sexuality and personal circumstances, again echoing previous research. They also noted that women scientists, when present, tended to be younger than the men, and there was a striking lack of ethnic diversity (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 14).
  • I’m going to be quite critical of this research. It’s not actively bad, it just seems to lack depth and precision. I suspect Mendick and Moreau were doing their best with low resources and an overly-broad brief. I also think that we are still feeling our way in terms of working out how to study online science media, and so can learn something from such a critique.
  • Problem number one: it’s a small study, and yet a ginormous topic. I’d much rather they had looked at less, but made more of it. At times I felt like I was reading a cursory glance at online science.
  • Problem number two: the methodological script seemed a bit stuck in the print era. I felt the study lacked a feel for the variety of routes people take through online science. It lacked a sense of online science’s communities and cliques, its cultures and sub-cultures, its history and its people. It lacked context. Most of all, it lacked a sense of what I think sits at the center of online communication: the link.
  • It tries to look at too much, too quickly. We’re told that of the blog entries sampled from Bad Science, three out of four of the women mentioned were associated with ‘bad science’, compared to 12 out of 27 of the men . They follow up this a note that Goldacre has appeared on television critiquing Greenfield,­ a clip of which is on his site (Mendick & Moreau, 2010: 17-18). OK, but ‘bad’ needs unpacking here, as does the gendered nature of the area Goldacre takes aim at. As for Susan Greenfield, she is a very complex character when it comes to the politics of science and gender (one I’d say it is dangerous to treat representations of simplistically). Moreover, this is a very small sample, without much feel for the broader media context the Bad Science blog works within, including not only other platforms for Ben Goldacre’s voice but comment threads, forums and a whole community of other ‘bad science bloggers’ (and their relationships with each other)
Weiye Loh

15-minute writing exercise closes the gender gap in university-level physics | Not Exac... - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...ap-in-university-level-physics

Science Gender Stereotype

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Think about the things that are important to you. Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or three of these values and write a few sentences about why they are important to you. You have fifteen minutes. It could change your life.
  • . In a university physics class, Akira Miyake from the University of Colorado used it to close the gap between male and female performance.
  • The exercise is designed to affirm a person’s values, boosting their sense of self-worth and integrity, and reinforcing their belief in themselves. For people who suffer from negative stereotypes, this can make all the difference between success and failure.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Aspiring female scientists and mathematicians still have to contend with the inaccurate stereotype that men are innately better at them in their chosen fields. On top of the challenging nature of their subject, they also have to deal with the dispiriting nature of the stereotype, and the fear that they might live up to it. This problem of “stereotype threat” is well known.
  • This isn’t the first time it has worked either. It was first used by Geoffrey Cohen (who Miyake works with) to turn the fortunes of black students in American high schools. They too face the problem of stereotype threat. In 2007, Cohen showed that his writing drill boosted the grades of black students, who still benefited even two years later. The gap between them and their white classmates narrowed and their grade point averages increased, particularly among the weakest students.
Weiye Loh

Working With Jerks - Do Your Job Better - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

chronicle.com/...123673

Science Academic Research

shared by Weiye Loh on 15 Oct 10 - Cached
  • For most projects, I work in groups that range in size from two to tens. In some cases, I can choose my collaborators, but there have been situations in which I have had to work with obnoxious, rude, patronizing, manipulative, controlling, unethical, and/or unpleasantly strange people
  • Academic jerks. The stress of acquiring tenure, and the opportunities for the tenured to exert power over the untenured, can result in certain people behaving in a less-than-nice way. In particular, the need to have many publications and grants may result in aggressive behavior (regarding authorship or principal-investigator status, for example), and the power that reviewers of grants and manuscripts hold over others can sometimes be misused.
  • A scientist once wrote to tell me that he was reviewing one of my manuscripts. In the same message, he asked me to pay for a research activity that was in his interest but not mine. I declined and forwarded his message to the journal editor.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Some tenured faculty members take advantage of the untenured in various ways involving research, teaching, or service. I used to have a senior colleague who asked me to teach his classes from time to time. He was not going to be out of town, and he was not teaching a subject for which he needed my expertise; he just wanted a break, and his preference was to ask tenure-track faculty members who would be unlikely to say no.
  • Why work with jerks? There are two answers: Because you have no choice. Or because, although you have a choice, you see some benefit in working with a particular jerk.
  • Before tenure, you need to make strategic decisions about projects and collaborators to maximize the significance and impact of your research.
  • r perhaps you do have a choice
  • from time to time I voluntarily work with a particular scientist who is unpleasant in a remarkable number of ways. He is manipulative, he tries to make me feel guilty for not devoting all my time and energy to his research, and he likes to take credit for my ideas and results. So why do I still work with him? I feel sorry for his graduate students. It is not their fault their adviser is a jerk, and it is easy for me to provide them with some useful data for their dissertation research. There are limits to my altruism, however, and I try to keep my interactions with that scientist infrequent.
  • The difficulty of breaking off an unpleasant collaboration may help perpetuate the jerk species in academe. In some cases, a breakup seems impossible because of complicating circumstances, like personal connections or research commitments. If there are such issues, you have to think carefully about whether, and how, to end that relationship.
  • A less dramatic way to end an unpleasant collaboration, however, is a gradual, diplomatic retreat, involving repeated claims of being too "busy" to work with a certain person.
  • Weiye Loh on 15 Oct 10
     
    Working With Jerks by Female Science Professor
Weiye Loh

Under The Microscope: Feminism, Scientists and Sexiness | The Intersection | Discover M... - 0 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...minism-scientists-and-sexiness

Science Feminism Equality

shared by Weiye Loh on 19 Jul 10 - Cached
  • “Why are most pundits men?” In another context, we might ask why men compose 97% of OpEds in the Wall Street Journal. Both involve the hesitancy of women to express opinions. Yet prominent female voices in our culture matter tremendously because they help to define our place in society. But if men get cast into the spotlight, you might say that women are examined under the microscope.

  • a funny thing happened when I entered academia; I learned that when a woman expresses herself visibly in any traditionally male-dominated field, the platform comes with the expectation that she will address gender issues. And over time it becomes a necessity. Last week Luke Muehlhauser caused a stir when he included me on a list of “sexy scientists.” Early on that thread, “Hansen” noted:mudflap

    Oh dear, you may be in serious trouble now for placing Sheril Kirshenbaum on that list.

  • Long before I set out to write a book dealing with human sexual behavior, I knew that evolution primed us to notice the alluring qualities of other members of our species. These are often indicative of health and fertility and women are held to different standards of judgment than men. But even if biology has an influence on how we behave, it’s not an adequate scapegoat. After all, we also have a large cerebral cortex that allows us to choose the way we interact in our communities.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • watching the way Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton were each cast as stereotypes, ogled, and photo-shopped by the media during their 2008 campaigns, I often wondered to myself why any little girl would dream of being in that position someday?
  • Increasing our numbers will involve changing cultural expectations by highlighting the accomplishments of a wider spectrum of women to demonstrate what we are capable of.
  • Returning to the hullabaloo over last week’s “sexy scientists” list, I honestly don’t think any real harm has been done to me personally. And it’s worth pointing out that in 2005 when Chris was named one of Wired Magazine’s “Sexiest Geeks,” no one complained. So while this may not be the way I’d most like to be featured, far worse items pop up across the Internet about me on a regular basis. To survive in the blogosphere, you grow a thick skin and keep in mind that there’s more to life than what happens online.
  • Weiye Loh on 19 Jul 10
     
    Under The Microscope: Feminism, Scientists and Sexiness
Weiye Loh

Genetic Sex Change : Real or hype? « Mathia Lee ~ Plans and Preoccupations - 0 views

mathialee.wordpress.com/...enetic-sex-change-real-or-hype

Sex Sexuality Science Academic Research

shared by Weiye Loh on 07 Mar 10 - Cached
  • the public puts too much faith in science, largely due to the way science news is written for the laymen. News that stopping a single gene, Foxl2, from functioning converts adult ovaries into testes, caused much stir and hope in the transgender community.

  • http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/genetics/article6952050.ece

    “December 11, 2009, by Hannah Devlin

    Scientists find single ‘on-off’ gene that can change gender traits –

    Scientists have identified the gene (Foxl2)  that keeps females female. An international team found that the action of a single gene is all that stops females from developing male physical traits, including testes and facial hair.

    When this gene was artificially “switched off” in adult female mice their ovaries began to turn into testes and they started to produce a level of testosterone found in healthy male mice.

    The discovery could eventually revolutionise gender reassignment therapy and improve treatments for babies who are born with a mixed gender.”

  • (I have reproduced a more accurate, less-hyped-up news report of the same scientific discovery here http://mathialee.wordpress.com/2009/12/16/genetic-basis-for-sexual-identity-at-the-cellular-level/ )
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Lay readers tend to make 3 common, basic false assumptions when reading science news like this
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 07 Mar 10
       
      Assumption 2: Everything about the health/biological condition or the gene you're interested in, has already been discovered. We have COMPLETE knowledge.
      Truth: Far from it. Science is not something where there are model answers written at the back of your workbook. Biological organisms are not a computer designed by humans where at least the designer knows something. No one knows the boundaries of Biological science, and one needs always to remember that.
    • Weiye Loh
      Weiye Loh on 07 Mar 10
       
      Assumption 3: Observations of mice and other organisms are reflective of human beings.
      Truth: SOME observations of mice and other organisms are reflective of human beings. This is the reason why drug and therapy development has to go through Phase 1, 2 and 3 of human trials AFTER successful animal experiments. 9 in 10 successful animal experiments DON"T become successful Phase 3 human trials.
  • “the public puts too much faith in science” as practiced by scientists, or science as reported by media?

  • It’s already tricky enough addressing media-reported science, without even going into the practice.

    I recently watched the movie “And the Band Played On” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_the_Band_Played_On_(film)
    about the early days of scientific discovery of the HIV.

    It’s SO typical of what goes on — the politics, the massaging of data, the big egos, etc etc

    I’ve come to the conclusion that in any, ANY, human organisation, there will be good and evil people, and in any person, there are good and evil …. *pensive stare*

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