Eastercon and diversity

[nanila]

lapswood was kind enough to send me a few photos he took at Eastercon last month. I thought this one made a nice illustration of some points that were made about PoCs and the (lack of) diversity at science fiction conventions.

This is from the panel I was on. Myself, the gentleman next to me and the man on the opposite end from me are all working scientists. The other man is the moderator - I'm not sure whether or not he is a scientist.



When I look at this picture, the first thing that pops into my head is the Sesame Street song: "One of these things is not like the others/One of these things just doesn't belong."

Visually, the thing that doesn't belong is me. And that makes me sad. What does it make you think?

Comments

[shirou]

I disagree with you: you absolutely look like you belong there. You don't look like the token female or Asian because scientists don't create token positions. I think science is pretty gender-blind and color-blind. On the downside, that means that a lot of (white, male) scientists don't recognize that the under-representation of women and minorities is a problem; but on the upside, it means that your audience will accept you and give you their respect and attention as long as you know what you're talking about. And you look like you know what you're talking about. You're definitely not there to be a box ticker.

By the way, are Asian scientists under-represented in the UK? I just ask out of curiosity. In the US, Asians make up nearly half of young physicists and are growing in number in the senior ranks. I'll admit we don't have many Filipinos, but we have lots of Japanese, Koreans, Thais, Indians and especially Chinese. When I got my PhD, I was the only one of the four grad students in my group who wasn't Chinese. I would never think of an Asian as a box ticker for race because here, Asians are the new majority.

[capri]

I'll admit we don't have many Filipinos, but we have lots of Japanese, Koreans, Thais, Indians and especially Chinese.

Aha, this is a thing even in Asia. Non-Indian brown-skinned people (like me) are nowhere to be found in the upper echelons of science/higher education/management/etc., and we're not the people people think about when they see the word "Asian."

[nanila]

Yes. Those of us from less recognisable Asian groups are still pretty marginalised.

All the Filipino girls in my university chemistry classes - except one, who was also interested in research - were nursing students.

[capri]

There is a part of me that does a little dance whenever I meet a fellow Singaporean in London who is neither Chinese nor Indian.

I have encountered (literally) hundreds of S'poreans here. That little dance has been done precisely twice.

[holyschist]

I think science is pretty gender-blind and color-blind.

I think science likes to think it is pretty gender-blind and color-blind, but I've got a growing collection of anecdata to the contrary. It's not that people have bad intentions, but scientists are just as prone to unexamined assumptions as anyone else, and possibly more prone to thinking we don't have them because we are so Rational and Scientific and Logical, we must be beyond all that.

I did my graduate work in a lab that was at most points about half women of color, and almost all women, and pretty much everyone had a long list of Stories. And I've read a lot of the studies on retention of women and minorities in physics and the geosciences, and I just don't think the numbers would be so bad if the field were doing so great already.

Science probably isn't the worst area to work in, but there's still a lot of room for improvement.

[nanila]

I think science is pretty gender-blind and color-blind.

I think scientific talent is gender-blind and colour-blind. I don't think scientists or science research culture are. Especially academic research culture. I think the continuing lack of women in higher positions in academia and industry is pretty compelling evidence of this.

By the way, are Asian scientists under-represented in the UK? I just ask out of curiosity.

It's very field-dependent. For instance, in physics, there are still few non-white scientists, with the exceptions of atmospheric physics and biophysics. Also, the meaning of "Asian" is slightly different. In the US, it tends to mean Chinese or southeast Asian. In the UK, it means Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi. Other Asians (including Filipinos) tend to be specifically denoted "East Asian".

[shirou]

I think the continuing lack of women in higher positions in academia and industry is pretty compelling evidence of this.

I actually disagree with this. I agree that the under-representation is a result of a cultural bias, but I believe it's a bias that the population at large has about science -- especially "hard" sciences like physics -- not a bias within science. On average, the fraction of graduate, postdoc and faculty positions offered to people of under-represented groups, especially women, is equal to or greater than the fraction of applicants.* The problem is that there are very few women and minority applicants, which I think stems from a culture that discourages people in those groups from pursuing science at a young age.

I overstated my original claim for the sake of simplicity, although I stand by my main point: you were selected for the panel because you deserved it, not so that you could check the diversity box. I don't think many scientists would even think about checking a diversity box, which one could probably argue as evidence for either blindness or bias. However, I do strongly believe that the real problem with recruitment of women and minorities into the sciences results more from prevalent cultures attitudes about science than from biases or practices among scientists.

*Data from select (top-tier) universities who contributed to an internal study my graduate school physics department performed regarding diversity - a small but not trivial sample size.

[boundbooks]

Just on an anecdote level, I took some physics in undergraduate. To set the scene, I attended a university that has been in the 'Top 10 colleges/universities in the US' for 10+ years.

My professor was a tenured astrophysicist. One time in class he told an anecdote from this days as a graduate student. My professor was in his late 40s, so this was probably 15 - 25 years ago, tops. So, late 80s to early 90s.

He told us that in his astrophysics graduate classes, there was one woman. The rest were men. He told us that he was in awe of how brilliant she was, and how she regularly her work outshone his own. He told us how the primary Big Name Astrophysicist professor, the one who was an adviser to many of the astrophysics students, would pick on her during class.

How that professor would make jokes about women being dumb, about how 'oh, but X is a girl, she wouldn't understand'. About how the professor would encourage the rest of the class to join in as they laughed at this woman. About how the female graduate student would regularly turn in work that was better than my professor's work, but receive grades an entire grade level below his. (ex. He'd receive an A, she'd receive a B or lower).

How she was relentlessly harassed and humiliated by that Big Name Astrophysicist, had her work graded far more harshly than anyone else in the entire program, and how she was held up as an example by that Big Name Astrophysicist of 'why women shouldn't be in science'.

She ended up dropping out of the program. My professor eventually graduated with a PhD and is now tenured at a university that is considered to have one of the world's top programs in Physics.

When our professor told us this anecdote, it was only 3 - 4 minutes out of the class. The one thing that sticks out in particular in my memory was just how sad he sounded. And how he kept saying 'she was smarter than I was' at several points.

So, I'm going to side with nanila on this one. Sure, there are population biases within science. But there are also damn good reasons - from within academic research culture - why it's hard for women to look at scientific research and say 'yes, this is totally a field that I will pursue'.

Women are missing generations of mentors, rolemodels, and simply people who won't say 'you can't do science because you're a woman' because of people like that Big Name Astrophysicist that once taught my college professor.

[shirou]

Your story is just one anecdote, and I'm not very fond of anecdotes, but it does identify a serious hole in my data: we collected only hiring statistics, not drop-out statistics. So while I maintain that science appears to do a fair or better-than-fair job of hiring women, I can't speak to retention. Thanks for giving me something else to think about.

That said, I still think that the presence of gender disparity early in the scientific career track suggests that society discourages women from pursuing scientific careers beginning at a young age.

[boundbooks]

Yeah, definitely drop out statistics are informative.

Say:

'How many women enter science undergraduates and switch majors' and then compare to male ratios

'How many women enter PhD programs and drop out' versus male PhD candidates

'How many women start tenure track and don't get tenure' versus male ratios

Etc.

I think that those kind of numbers would be valuable too. :)

[boundbooks]

Hi! :)

I know that this thread is super-old, but it was totally an interesting debate. Today, something came across my radar that I thought you might find interesting, so I came back to pass it on to you! :)

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2012/09/19/scientists-your-gender-bias-is-showing/
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109