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markfrankel18

Let's call everyone "they": Gender-neutral language should be the norm, not the excepti... - 1 views

  • When someone refers to a Hispanic person or a lesbian or someone with blue eyes or curly hair or double-jointed thumbs, it’s not unreasonable to question whether the detail is merely a rhetorical flourish of sorts or is, in the speaker’s mind, substantively relevant. Such superfluous details can often be offered as a way of reinforcing a stereotype without outright stating it. It is no surprise that we often respond to statements like “My black coworker is always late” or “That blonde student is actually quite smart” or “My gay friend is so dramatic” by asking what, exactly, the speaker is “trying to say.” We are entitled to our indignation because the language presented a very clear alternative; these traits needn’t have been mentioned at all.
  • When it comes to gender, on the other hand, the language has traditionally presented no elegant alternative. We are forced to clumsily dance around the matter, or to give in and refer to our coworkers, students and friends as “he” or “she.”
  • Instead, we ought to revert to the gender neutral “they” whenever gender is not explicitly relevant. Least of all because, if the goal is greater inclusion, limiting the use of the singular they to these cases doesn’t even have the desired effect.
Lawrence Hrubes

Should Patients Be Allowed to Choose - or Refuse - Doctors by Race or Gender? - The New... - 0 views

  • Everyone knows that doctors must not discriminate on the basis of gender, sexuality, race, religion or national origin when they select or treat patients: It’s an obligation they accepted when they entered the health care profession. (That doesn’t mean they have to take all comers; they can turn away patients for various other reasons.) But should patients be able to choose clinicians on the basis of such attributes? The answer is: It depends.
sleggettisp

The Three Letter Word Driving a Gender Revolution_Hen_Newsweek - 0 views

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    Fredrik Sandberg/Scanpix fs dm/KS/Reuters "We haven't started using it at home yet, but it's just a matter of habit," says Sofia Bergman, a Swedish mother of two. "But it's a good thing if nurseries and schools use it." She's referring to hen, the new Swedish gender-neutral pronoun introduced at two Stockholm nurseries in 2012.
Lawrence Hrubes

Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture | WIRED - 1 views

  • So this was the real test. Would native-speaker Swedes, seven years after getting a new pronoun plugged into their language, be more likely to assume this androgynous cartoon was a man? A woman? Either, or neither? Now that they had a word for it, a nonbinary option, would they think to use it?
Lawrence Hrubes

Female Scientists Turn to Data to Fight Lack of Representation on Panels - The New York... - 0 views

  • Among the defenders of the project, however, is Anne Churchland, a neuroscientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory who studies how people make decisions. In 2001, she started Anne’s List, a directory of 170 women in computational neuroscience, intended to silence claims that no good female scientists existed in that field.Her research suggests that someone you recently had lunch with or someone from your hometown might spring to mind when selecting a speaker, even though neither has anything to do with science.“It doesn’t feel like irrelevant information influences our judgment, but it does,” Dr. Churchland said.
Lawrence Hrubes

Don't Ban 'Bossy' : The New Yorker - 2 views

  • There are precedents for such reclaiming—pejorative words like “queer” and even “slut,” for instance, which their targets have taken over and brandished with pride. But maybe a more apt comparison would be the word “nerd.” “Nerd” used to be a put-down—and it used to cover boys more often than girls. Like “bossy,” it wasn’t really that harsh, but it wasn’t nice, either. It actually had a gender dimension, too, because it called out brainy boys who were not athletic or aggressive. It was a dis of boys who lived in their heads and wore pocket protectors and ate their lunch indoors, playing chess. Just as “bossy” might be said to undermine female leadership, “nerd” might be said to have undermined male intellectualism. But now “nerd,” and its close cousin “geek,” are words that lots of people are happy to identify with, humble-bragging about their obsessive expertise. Brainiac techies can get rich these days, and that has helped spiff up the image of nerdery. John Green, an author of young-adult novels, and his brother Hank have developed a thriving online and off-line community of “nerdfighters,” girls as well as boys, who like to say that they fight for good with their brains and hearts, calculators and trombones. They have heartthrobs like the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. They find each other on Tumblr.
Lawrence Hrubes

Beyond 'he' and 'she': The rise of non-binary pronouns - BBC News - 0 views

  • In the English language, the word "he" is used to refer to males and "she" to refer to females. But some people identify as neither gender, or both - which is why an increasing number of US universities are making it easier for people to choose to be referred to by other pronouns.Kit Wilson's introduction when meeting other people is: "Hi, I'm Kit. I use they/them pronouns." That means that when people refer to Kit in conversation, the first-year student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee would prefer them to use "they" rather than "she" or "he".
markfrankel18

BBC - Culture - The Instagram artist who fooled thousands - 3 views

  • Artist Amalia Ulman created an online persona and recorded it on Instagram to ask questions about gender online. Cadence Kinsey asks what her project tells us about our own social media identities. facebook Twitter reddit WhatsApp Google + Email
Lawrence Hrubes

Alyson McGregor: Why medicine often has dangerous side effects for women | TED Talk | T... - 0 views

  • For most of the past century, drugs approved and released to market have been tested only on male patients, leading to improper dosing and unacceptable side effects for women. The important physiological differences between men and women have only recently been taken into consideration in medical research. Emergency doctor Alyson McGregor studies these differences, and in this fascinating talk she discusses the history behind how the male model became our framework for medical research and how understanding differences between men and women can lead to more effective treatments for both sexes
Lawrence Hrubes

Caster Semenya and the Logic of Olympic Competition - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • I’ve been astonished at how many people fail to appreciate the athletic significance of this. Remember, this is a competitive issue, not a human-rights issue. No one is saying that Semenya isn’t a woman, a human being, and an individual deserving of our full respect.
  • Semenya is equipped with an extraordinary and anomalous genetic advantage.
  • That premise hopefully agreed, we then see that the presence of the Y chromosome is the single greatest genetic “advantage” a person can have. That doesn’t mean that all men outperform all women, but it means that for élite-sport discussion, that Y chromosome, and specifically the SRY gene on it, which directs the formation of testes and the production of testosterone, is a key criterion on which to separate people into categories.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - She Who Tells a Story: Female lens on Iran and the Arab world - 0 views

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    "In the Middle East, a number of pioneering female photographers have risen to prominence, using art to defy stereotypes and explore questions of identity in the changing region."
Lawrence Hrubes

Long Story Long: A Cartoon Controversy : The New Yorker - 0 views

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    "I was very pleased with the results of the cliché caption contest, but, while many people shared my opinion that the finalists were funny, some women took umbrage at this cartoon, considering it offensive to women"
Michael Peters

Increasing Number Of Men Pressured To Accept Realistic Standards Of Female Beauty | The... - 0 views

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    Satire, but totally on-point.
Lawrence Hrubes

Labs Are Told to Start Including a Neglected Variable: Females - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • For decades, scientists have embarked on the long journey toward a medical breakthrough by first experimenting on laboratory animals. Mice or rats, pigs or dogs, they were usually male: Researchers avoided using female animals for fear that their reproductive cycles and hormone fluctuations would confound the results of delicately calibrated experiments.That laboratory tradition has had enormous consequences for women. Name a new drug or treatment, and odds are researchers know far more about its effect on men than on women. From sleeping pills to statins, women have been blindsided by side effects and dosage miscalculations that were not discovered until after the product hit the market.
Lawrence Hrubes

Elizabeth Kolbert: Why Are We So Busy? : The New Yorker - 0 views

  • n the winter of 1928, John Maynard Keynes composed a short essay that took the long view. It was titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” and in it Keynes imagined what the world would look like a century hence. By 2028, he predicted, the “standard of life” in Europe and the United States would be so improved that no one would need to worry about making money. “Our grandchildren,” Keynes reckoned, would work about three hours a day, and even this reduced schedule would represent more labor than was actually necessary.
  • According to Keynes, the nineteenth century had unleashed such a torrent of technological innovation—“electricity, petrol, steel, rubber, cotton, the chemical industries, automatic machinery and the methods of mass production”—that further growth was inevitable. The size of the global economy, he forecast, would increase sevenfold in the following century, and this, in concert with ever greater “technical improvements,” would usher in the fifteen-hour week.
  • Four-fifths of the way through Keynes’s century, half of his vision has been realized. Since “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” was published, the U.S. gross domestic product has grown, in real terms, by a factor of sixteen, and G.D.P. per capita by a factor of six. And what holds for the United States goes for the rest of the world, too: in the past eighty years, the global economy has grown at a similar rate.
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  • But if we have become, in aggregate, as rich as Keynes imagined, this wealth has not translated into leisure. (When was the last time someone you know complained about having too little to do?) In terms of economic theory, this is puzzling. In terms of everyday life, it’s enough to, well, induce a nervous breakdown.
markfrankel18

Why Are Certain Smells So Hard to Identify? - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • A recent paper in the journal Cognition, for instance, quipped that if people were as bad at naming sights as they are at naming scents, “they would be diagnosed as aphasic and sent for medical help.” The paper quoted scattershot attempts by participants in a previous study to label the smell of lemon: “air freshener,” “bathroom freshener,” “magic marker,” “candy,” “lemon-fresh Pledge,” “some kind of fruit.” This sort of difficulty seems to have very little to do, however, with the nose’s actual capabilities. Last spring, an article in the journal Science reported that we are capable of discriminating more than a trillion different odors. (A biologist at Caltech subsequently disputed the finding, arguing that it contained mathematical errors, though he acknowledged the “richness of human olfactory experience.”) Whence, then, our bumbling translation of scent into speech?
  • That question was the subject, two weekends ago, of an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium at the San Jose Convention Center (which smelled, pleasantly but nonspecifically, of clean carpet). The preëminence of eye over nose was apparent even in the symposium abstract, which touted data that “shed new light” and opened up “yet new vistas.” (Reading it over during a phone interview, Jonathan Reinarz, a professor at the University of Birmingham, in England, and the author of “Past Scents: Historical Perspectives on Smell,” asked me, “What’s wrong with a little bit of inscent?”) Nevertheless, the people on the panel were decidedly pro-smell. “One thing that everyone at this symposium will agree on is that human olfactory discriminatory power is quite excellent, if you give it a chance,” Jay Gottfried, a Northwestern University neuroscientist, told me. Noam Sobel, of the Weizmann Institute of Science, used a stark hypothetical to drive home the ways in which smell can shape behavior: “If I offer you a beautiful mate, of the gender of your choice, who smells of sewage, versus a less attractive mate who smells of sweet spice, with whom would you mate?”
  • But difficulty with talking about smell is not universal. Asifa Majid, a psycholinguist at Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands, and the organizer of the A.A.A.S. symposium, studies a group of around a thousand hunter-gatherers in northern Malaysia and southern Thailand who speak a language called Jahai. In one analysis, Majid and her colleague Niclas Burenhult found that speakers of Jahai were as good at classifying scratch-and-sniff cards as they were at classifying color chips; their English-speaking counterparts, meanwhile, tended to give meandering and disparate descriptions of scents. At the symposium, Majid presented new research involving around thirty Jahai and thirty Dutch people. In that study, the Jahai named smells in an average of two seconds, whereas the Dutch took thirteen—“and this is just to say, ‘Uh, I don’t know,’ ” Majid joked onstage.
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  • Olfaction experts each have their pet theories as to why our scent lexicon is so lacking. Jonathan Reinarz blames the lingering effects of the Enlightenment, which, he says, placed a special emphasis on vision. Jay Gottfried, who is something of a nasal prodigy—he once guessed, on the basis of perfume residue, that one of his grad students had gotten back together with an ex-girlfriend—blames physiology. Whereas visual information is subject to elaborate processing in many areas of the brain, his research suggests, odor information is parsed in a much less intricate way, notably by the limbic system, which is associated with emotion and memory formation. This area, Gottfried said, takes “a more crude and unpolished approach to the process of naming,” and the brain’s language centers can have trouble making use of such unrefined input. Meanwhile, Donald A. Wilson, a neuroscientist at New York University School of Medicine, blames biases acquired in childhood.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - French veil law: Muslim woman's challenge in Strasbourg - 2 views

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    ""Wearing the full veil not only makes it difficult to identify a person, it makes her indistinguishable from other full veil wearers and effectively erases the woman who wears it," she told the court. Ramby de Mello, a British lawyer representing the unnamed woman, said the law violated his client's religious, free speech and privacy rights and made her feel "like a prisoner in her own country"."
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Afghan artist in hiding after 'iron underwear' stunt - 2 views

  • An Afghan artist has been forced into hiding after receiving death threats for dressing in a metal suit featuring exaggerated breasts and buttocks. Kubra Khademi wore the unusual armour in a performance on the streets of Kabul to highlight the problems of sexual harassment faced by women. She had hoped to make a walk lasting for 10 minutes but in the event was forced back into her car by an angry mob of men after only eight minutes. The men threw things and even children were shouting at her.
Lawrence Hrubes

If Your Teacher Likes You, You Might Get A Better Grade : NPR Ed : NPR - 2 views

  • A newly published paper suggests that personality similarity affects teachers' estimation of student achievement. That is, how much you are like your teacher contributes to his or her feelings about you — and your abilities. "Astonishingly, little is known about the formation of teacher judgments and therefore about the biases in judgments," says Tobias Rausch, an author of the study and a research scientist at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg. "However, research tells us that teacher judgments often are not accurate."
  • For example, a recent study from Israel showed that teachers gave girls lower grades on math tests when they knew their gender. And lots of researchers have looked at the importance of having teachers who share the racial and socioeconomic backgrounds of their students.
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