Archive for the ‘Progress and politics’ Category

Newer Entries »

A river of crap drowns out women in academia

Friday, November 3rd, 2006

Former Health & Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala recently took part in a taskforce on the status of women in academic science and engineering. The taskforce’s findings were dismal.

Despite this optimistic piece in Newsweek, women still don’t have proportional representation in academic sciences, Shalala writes:

For more than 30 years, women have made up more than 30 percent of the doctorates in social and behavioral sciences and more than 20 percent of the doctorates in life sciences. Yet at the top research institutions, only about 15 percent of the full professors in these fields are women.

The reason isn’t biology, childrearing demands, or differences in biology, as Alternet’s Caryl Rivers wrote. It’s “discrimination pure and simple.” She cites a river of crap spewed by supposed experts who claim, based on sketchy science, that women’s brains just aren’t suited for anything involving leadership or tricky number crunching. (Warning: reading Rivers’ piece will piss you off.)
Shalala puts it best:

Yes, there are some slight differences in the ways men’s and women’s brains operate. But the same researchers who stress these differences often fail to note the many more areas in which men and women share the same approaches. Study after study indicates no significant biological differences between men and women in performing science and mathematics that could account for the lower representation of women in these fields.

She recommends a raft of policies, including woman-friendly hiring and tenure policies and new federal regulations.

And the problem starts early, as I See Invisible People points out:

My daughers had not a single woman teacher in science or math in high school. My son has had only one. Universities, as well as high schools, need to make a serious effort to recruit and promote women in under-represented areas if we’re to make any headway on the issue. To quote the old public service announcement, a mind is a terrible thing to waste. And that’s exactly what’s happening. I’m encouraged to see the Academies make a stand on it.

Posted in Career advice, Progress and politics, They actually said that? | No Comments »

Ask your candidates the tough questions!

Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

This is awesome. Culture Kitchen has a science quiz that you should all ask your local House and Senate candidates. Questions include whether the candidates support stem cell research and teaching evolution, but also immigration policy for scientists and engineers and federal funding for science research.

Posted in Progress and politics | No Comments »

Overalls and cliffs: we’re all feminists

Thursday, November 2nd, 2006

Margaret Atwood admitted she likes science fiction at a Barnes & Noble reading, according to Bookish Love. Asked whether she considers herself a feminist writer, though, she got “subtly indignant.”

…not towards the woman who asked the question, but towards the need for the question in the first place. She said terms like that were “filing mechanisms.” Then, she addressed the audience as a whole, saying, first we have to talk about what you mean by feminism. Are we talking about driving all the men off a cliff, wearing overalls, or equal rights under the law? She said if she held a tally right now, she would guess we all were feminists. First, she said, the question would be do we think women are human beings or animals? She guessed we’d all say human beings. Then, she continued with a list of several questions in her hypothetical survey, do we think women should be able to learn to read and write, to vote, and then to the “more sticky” question of should women earn and equal amount as men for the same work, in the same position. Her final point being, implicitly, we should all be considering ourselves feminists if we understand our definitions correctly.

Posted in Beautiful geekery, Inspiring women, Progress and politics | 1 Comment »

Bringing engineers back, plus discovering HIV

Tuesday, October 31st, 2006

On Monday, Women In Technology honored five women who’ve made strides in scientific or technical fields, including Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, who co-discovered HIV. Also inducted into their “Hall of Fame” were Maria Azua, a vice president at IBM who holds 27 patents and has another 59 pending, and Been-Jon Woo, an engineer at Intel who holds 13 patents.

Another honoree has helped HP realize that helping women engineers return to work after they give birth isn’t rocket science, according to the inspiring lede in the Mercury News story:

The pattern was depressing. For years, Nor Rae Spohn watched as women engineers at Hewlett-Packard would take time off work to have children and then disappear. “The technology moved quickly, and you couldn’t entice them to come back,” she said.

But Spohn, vice president of business imaging and printing at HP in Boise, and her management team worked to get women engineers to come back to work part time — anywhere from two to four days a week. The result: Her organization is 22 percent women in a male-dominated industry. “As their kids get older, they gladly come back to the workplace and we haven’t lost them,” she said.

The fifth honoree, Kim Jones from Sun Microsystems, was quoted as saying: “I want to pass on the message that diversity is critical in all decisions a business makes.”

Posted in Career advice, Inspiring women, Progress and politics, Tech talk | No Comments »

Newer Entries »