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

[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