I’m going to be too busy for real blogging over the next couple of weeks, but fortunately I’m not too proud to refrain from cutting and pasting entire posts from other blogs! This one from FemaleScienceProfessor:
Discussion at a faculty meeting:
Department Chair: Some of you may be interested in an upcoming visit to the university by a group from University A to share information about their program to increase the participation of women in science, engineering, and math. [hands around an informational memo, including the list of names of the visitors]
Young Male Colleague: Hey, I know X! [mentions name of one of the visitors]. What is HE doing going around talking about women’s issues? He’s a real scientist! And a guy!
Me: Men can be involved in helping solve the problem of the underrepresentation of women in science, engineering, and math.
Young Male Colleague: No, I mean, this guy isn’t effeminate or anything. He’s really a.. a.. a.. a guy!
Senior Female Colleague: Perhaps he is transgendered.
Young Male Colleague, missing the obvious sarcasm, and offended on behalf of the Real Guy: I can assure you that he is nothing of the sort.
Me: He must be a eunuch then.
[Chair steps in and changes the subject]
Although it hardly needs saying, I’d like to point out that my own occasional forays into “talking about women’s issues” are not evidence that I am not a real scientist, nor that I am not a guy. Quite the contrary, in fact; they are but a necessary corrective. My guy-ness is looming, unmistakable, and, frankly, intimidating. Take my word for it, hypermasculinity can be a curse as well as a blessing. So when I talk about how it would be nice if young girls were given the same opportunities and encouragement to pursue science as young boys, I’m doing it in large part to take the edge off of the fear that my unbridled manliness can strike into the hearts of lesser guys.
I’m not sure I’m going far enough, though. Perhaps I should start wearing more floral prints, or take up knitting.
Young Male Colleague needs to have his ass kicked. Preferably by a chick.
And people wonder why there’s a problem getting women to join the science brigades. Don’t kick YoungMale Colleague’s ass; just impugn his own masculinity and credentials by wondering aloud why he wouldn’t care about the status of women in his department and how he could do real science with such a skewed viewpoint. Only the terminally stupid (as opposed to just ignorant) could think otherwise.
Does Arxiv accept submissions in the form of needlepoint?
I love how pushing for equality is only for people with nothing better to do, unlike REAL science guys.
This “not a real man” suggestion is similar to the Adolf Hitler fallacy in this:
When in a debate, if your opponent has you pinned with great arguments, if you can successfully compare him and his ideas to those of Adolf Hitler people will think: Well in that case his ideas and arguments must be terrible.
Similarly, it seems when people are idiots on an issue, if they can successfully claim their opponent only thinks that way because, you know, “he’s not a real man” then sometimes people think: in that case maybe his ideas aren’t that great.
It’s an unfortunate fallacy. Defending the rights of women is a good thing even if it is painted as something “real men” don’t get involved with.
For the young colleague to object that his friend’s guy-ness was incompatible with an interest in the gender imbalance in science was out of line. The comment about being a “real scientist,” on the other hand, could be interpreted along more general lines of the attitude that real scientists do science, they don’t serve on panels about the state of science. I am reminded of the opening to G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematicians’s Apology:
Come now, toff. Real men don’t use sarcasm.
Hyperbole, litotes and satire, yes, but no sarcasm.
I hope you got permission to copy the entire post.
I’m guessing Female Science Professor doesn’t mind having it shared with a wider audience. Given the sense/context of the post.
My feeling toward G.H. Hardy and his opinions toward the character or ‘mind’ of the mathematician and non-mathematician…
“It is a melencholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself writing about mathematics.”
This is a a benign and sympathetic statement.
“It is a melencholy experience for a professional mathematician to find himself calculating successive approximations to convince himself/herself of the delta epsilon approach to evaluating a limit.” (That is a quote from me, not Lord, Sir and ‘The Magnificent’ G.H. Hardy.
This too is a benign and sympathetic statement.
However,
Second-rate minds do engage in actual mathematics and are in fact indistinguishable from first-rate minds, and Hardy’s position is invalid.
[Second-rate character does not engage in actual mathematics and in fact, are the bane of our entire society. Please note, first-rate character does not imply motivation for mathematics, us mathematicians just rather apply ourselves to mathematics rather than any other equally valid human endeavor.]
Hardy is too arrogant to use as a support for any argument toward the character of a real mathematician or a non-mathematician.
“A Mathematicians’s Apology” is full of such arrogance and is a quite uncomfortable read. On the other hand, “A Course in Pure Mathematics” is a terrific book, and should be introduced early in the general education of any person remotely inclined toward rational thought.
Go figure.
Is it another Rambo film, or one more Shakespeare Play
Is it another short story or one of Galaxies far far away
Is it all about the weather or just another sunfilled day
Is it all about transgender or simply about feeling ‘gay’
–
Is it really possible to be original and still have something to say
–
What did you learn at school – says mum to the little girl – today
Oh, I learnt I can probably have my own way, if I go all the way
But in the end it is gravity will have its way, gravity win the day
–
I heard her say!
(I know, I know it’s only a play!)
Oh! And my daddy
died from a dart to the heart from a Stingray
–
that’s what I heard the little girl say yesterday
–
we all gotta go one day – whether this way or that way
I guess thereafter, gravity really holds little or no sway!
Wow, Sean, thanks for linking to that story.
I gotta say, at your recent colloquium, I noticed that your hyper-manliness was indeed oozing all over the room. Glad you’ve got it under control by forcing yourself to spend some time on “women’s issues” like equality, fairness, and building a truly merit-based scientific community. 😉
It’s a darn shame that FemaleScienceProfessor’s department doesn’t provide a supportive enough environment for Young Male Colleague to come out of the closet he’s so obviously in.
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AD, you were at the talk and didn’t say hi? I didn’t mean for my manliness to be that intimidating.
Intimidating indeed for a demure, well-heeled debutante like myself!
No seriously, the talk was a while back. Great talk, learned lots, enjoyed it, too. Plus, I LOVED how few words were on your slides — that the slides were to draw analogies and connections. That style of presentation looks really hard to write (is it?), but much more effective than the normal, “I will read verbatim from my slides” method.
And my mild-mannered alter ego did say hi. 🙂
It’s not so hard to write slides with few words on them. I’m just too lazy to type too many words.
A talk is different from a paper, and both are different from how you think about things in your brain, and the slides of your talk are different from the words you say out loud. At some point I’ll write a post about bad talks.
Young Male Colleague really ought to get wise to the fact that REAL MEN don’t have opinions on sexual equality. They don’t do faggy teaching jobs at universities. They don’t eat quiche, and they don’t worry about their or anyone else’s sexual orientation. REAL MEN drive trucks or fight ragheads thousands of miles from America. The only REAL MEN who attend meetings are Traders, and only because the market hasn’t opened yet.
Jesus Christ
Count one more case of systematic exclusion. There are those who belong and those who don’t. The “IN” club is defined by often unspoken rules and the young guy has voiced them in public.
This sounds like a “just-so” story. Well done. I am always pleased when “the cause” is helped by an intimidating guy. It makes it easier for us to do what needs to be done.
Good Lord. The young male collegue really does need his ass handed to him intellectually, preferably by an extremely attractive female of his own age group.
I, on the other hand, met the most enlightened car mechanic ever who not only didn’t try to hose me, but also assumed I was completely capable of minor repairs and addressed me without any sarcasm as Doctor. Funny what throwing around a little word like torque will do to a gear head.
The customer service rep, however, was a dolt and told me not to worry my pretty little head about it and they’d fix it for me.
At least I don’t have to put up with that at work. A full 40% of my surgical residency program is female.
Bérubé! Bérubé!
So groovy!
For the last year, I’ve followed this site with the interest of a nonscientist, who maybe under different circumstances, would have considered the pursuit of science as a career; instead, when my turn to decide my college major occurred more than thirty years ago, I chose to become a history major and then after cutting short my grad studies in history, went to law school. Since I’ve been seen other posts on this issue on Cosmic Variance, I’m not as stunned as perhaps I should be by the attitude women face in the scientific field.
Nevertheless, it saddens me. Perhaps I’m a little unrealistic about this, but it would seem that of all of the disciplines, science should exhibit the least of this attitude. As a lawyer, I could argue for virtually any position, such as the absolute inferiority of women (and, of course, many in my field did for many years, both blocking women from voting and then once women were given the vote, arguing that women could not make good lawyers because they were too soft, or too nonconfrontational, or too interested in starting and raising families to devote the time needed to practice law). Facts in science differ from facts in law. A Don Henley song phrase too uncomfortably describes this distinction: “There are no facts, just data to be manipulated.”
But there seems no room for this kind of attitude in science. To me, science and golf are comparable: although each field has a level of collaboration and no one can truly have all the right answers (Tiger Woods will occasionally miss a three-foot putt and Einstein would explain his reservations about aspects of quantum mechanics with his “playing dice” quote), in the end, it would seem only the results would matter.
If Tiger, as he has, wins a tremendous number of golf tournaments, preconceived notions about him must fall by the wayside. And Einstein would acknowledge that his reservations about quantum mechanics were error. Perhaps I would have presumed a universality for this attitude in science. When I started college in the 70s, less than 1/3 of my fellow first-year students were female; since I was in the first truly mixed class of students at my school, less than 10% of the school’s total student population was female. Even under these conditions, it would have been hard for me to believe that any truly first-rate professor would have adopted the Young Male Colleague’s attitude; yet, I know professors at the time who did because they believed that women had no place at an institution of higher learning and that no serious academic should have needed to concern himself with expanding (and improving) the pool of applicants to be considered.
I would have hoped that thirty years of proof and experience might have changed attitudes. I’m especially bothered by the persistence of these attitudes because I realize it’s my peers from my university years who are now in positions of power at universities around the world who make decisions about the types of grad students and faculty to recruit, admit, hire, maintain, promote, and fire. And, who hear a Young Male Colleague’s comment and think, “See, I’m not such a dinosaur about this stuff after all; even the young bucks think as I do about women in science.”
And the worst moral of the story may be that because of the unspoken agreement of some (many?) of his superiors in the room with the Young Male Colleague, he may eventually move up the ladder much faster than any of the women who may be recruited as a result of any outreach program this university might institute, no matter the quality of his work.
Academics in general are, with regard to their own systems and culture, among the most conservative group with which I have ever interacted (including the upper level mangement at such bastions of liberal thinking as IBM). This goes far beyond issues of gender to the broader category of “the way things are done.” From the way courses are taught, to responses and interactions with students inside and outside of the classroom, to the hiring and promotion of faculty, any deviations from “the way things have always been done” are viewed with great suspicion at best, and publically stomped into tiny pieces at worst.
What greatly complicates the effort to introduce change is that academics view themselves (in general) as extremely open-minded, liberal in their views toward new ideas, and purely rational in all of their decisions.
A recent discussion with a college counselor who advises and advocates for students at a highly selective institution focused on the frustration in dealing with professors whose attitudes seem to date to the mid-1800’s — and the damage this inflicts on students. The counselor noted that many of the younger professors were just as difficult.
But of course — who hired them? Self-perpetuation is one of the key foundations of conservative cultures.