Standard Deviations From the Beaten Path

I never got far enough learning German to tell you if there are different genders for “intuition” and “logic”, but that’s not what this is about, anyhow. Alex at A Most Curious Planet asks, “Is Science Sexist?” Chad at Uncertain Principles responds with “Huh?” Don’t worry he explains.

To me this is a question that is only slightly more sane than the faux-feminist accusation that science is a man’s way of knowing that suppresses an equal, but unexplainable (and actually fictitious) woman’s way of knowing. In terms of answering practical scientific questions, science is the way of knowing. As Chad points out, intuition isn’t separate from science, which is not strictly logic. (more…)

My spittle flecked rant last night about some mysterious female complement to science being promoted by my latest foray into gender-bending science fiction (which I’ve temporarily put down so I can calm down and read about going to outer space–for reals) was followed up by pleasant coincidence this morning by an article on Science Cheerleader which asks, “Why so few women in science?”

It’s a good read by itself, and it also links to a lot of other good reads which would doubtlessly keep me busy for at least an hour if I weren’t at work. So go give it a look see.

I may or may not have mentioned in passing that I set a goal for myself this year to read every one of the James Tiptree, Jr. award winners going all the way back to 1991. I’ve finished 1991 (A Woman of the Iron People), 1992 (China Mountain Zhang), and 1993 (Ammonite). The books for ’91 and ’93 weren’t fantastic, but worth reading. China Mountain Zhang, though was amazing and I recommend it strongly. At first it caught me just because it was the first science fiction novel I’ve read with a gay main character not written by Samuel R. Delany.

So I’ve been going at about one book per two months instead of two books per month like I’d need to do it all in 2009, but it’s still been rewarding. And I was really exited to start the next entry to arrive in my possession, 1995′s Memoirs of Elisabeth Frankenstein. I was actually nearly in love with the book, until (here be spoilers)…
(more…)

Earlier in the week there was an interesting discussion going on at Feministing that I feel like I should say something about. There’s a summary Community Blog Round-Up and probably the most relevant-to-my-thoughts post here.

So I’m a feminist. I could go on in long winded fashion about what feminism means to me, but I honestly don’t find that important right now. The nature of the discussion is: are male feminists over or under rated? I don’t know that I can address that question either, actually. But I can say quite definitively for myself, though, that I’d rather not be rated at all.

I’m just doing what I can, which for the most part is just engaging in personal discussion with my friends and those around me. I don’t want a cookie or recognition any more than I want to be admonished for not doing more. If I get out of line, fail to recognize my own privilege (which still exists, even if I am wearing a “This is what a feminist looks like.” button), I’d like a reminder. But I really do think most people can spend their time better than by either talking up or talking down male participation in feminism.

Sorry for not posting very often. I promise it’s not because I don’t want to. But enough of my complaining about one topic, and more of me complaining about the massive Internet @#$! storms that have been moving through the past couple of weeks. I heard about the suspension of the James Randi Educational Foundation YouTube account via this article on Skepchick. I appreciate, and even felt, the knee-jerk reaction to feel intentionally attacked. But my next course of action was to mosey on over to Bad Astronomy land, where the author, Phil Plait, is the president of JREF. He seemed pretty calm.

So I withdrew my angry tirade until I knew what was going on. Thanks to my subscription to the very same suspended YouTube account, I caught Randi’s commentary on what happened after everything was taken care of. Here’s Randi’s video discussing what happened. Honestly, I speculated that the cause of the suspension was because of copyrighted material. The JREF has an account loaded with old interviews by people I’m sure were famous before I was born. Something in there was bound to trip a copyright detector of some kind.

So the JREF suspension was innocent, and ultimately corrected. But last night the Amazon de-listing of gay and and lesbian related books hit the fan. I would like to make it abundantly clear that I have no idea what’s going on. But there is some serious over reaction going on before we’ve even heard any attempt at a defense by Amazon. I’m pretty much going to stand in the line behind Amanda Marcote over at Pandagon. I don’t know what happened, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a hostile act by Amazon and I’m not going to write an angry letter to anyone until I know more. Some others in the feminist blog-verse will tell you otherwise. Rnee at Womanist Musings seems ready to abandon reason and jump into the fray.

The entire Internet is throwing a fit. Mob thinking tells me I should be, too, but I don’t think that’s an appropriate course of action. There’s a chance that no evil has been perpetrated here, so until there’s a clear reason to be angry at a specific entity for slighting the LGBT community, I  feel like my efforts can be more productively focused elsewhere. If Amazon really is falling in line behind some bigoted blowhards and censoring books, I’d be willing to start feeding the beast that is Apple and buy my music from iTunes instead. I’ll even write Amazon an email telling them as much. But now is a little premature.

Today, March 24th, is Ada Lovelace Day. In honor of one of the world’s first computer programmers and kickass woman Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace a bunch of people are blogging about women in technology today. I, for one, can’t pick just one person on whom to focus my attention, but I’ll start with Lise Meitner.

A few years ago a friend of mine recomended a book by Richard Rhodes called The Making of the Atomic Bomb. I love narrative, history, and physics, so it seemed a good bet and I bought a copy. I also get a kick out of looking at old photographs, and this book has three sections of black and white images of the people involved in the many projects that led to the atomic  bomb.

One thing in particular struck me, though. All of the women in those images were wives or children of the predominantly male physicists and chemists. Except for Lise Meitner. She worked with Otto Hahn in Germany prior to WWII and has quite an extensive list of accomplishments including the discovery of several new elements, and, after the discovery of the neutron in the 1930s, trying to synthesize elements heavier than uranium. During the second world war she fled to Denmark and exchanged letters with Otto Hahn to plan new experiments he would perform in Berlin which led to the discovery of nuclear fission.

Otto Hahn later recieved a Nobel prize for these experiments, but Meitner was left out. That’s been the inspiration for my computer naming scheme ever since reading about her. My desktop at home is named after her, and my work laptop is named after Sophie Germain, who Rebecca Watson posted about earlier today. Sophie was a contemporary of Karl Friedrich Gauss and actually collaborated with and preceded him with several mathematical discoveries.

And since my understanding of Ada Lovelace day is that it extends to all women who use technology in new and innovative ways, not only those who develop it, I’m going to have to give a further shout out to Rebecca Watson and the rest of the Skepchicks. Also, to Jessica Valenti and the other fabulous folks at Feministing. If it were not for all of them I never would have felt like I could make a difference. Because there are bloggers out there attracting the attention of all kinds of people and having discussions about topics that are important to them that might not otherwise take place in the mainstream media, I feel like the world’s a little bit better. Keep on rocking the internet.

Sorry for my long absence. My newfound free time has been harder to adjust to that I thought it would. Recently, I’ve been wanting to ask a rather interesting question relating to gender and language. Women are not very nemerous in the physics world. Nonethless, I have female colleages for whom I have much respect. What I find strange is that these fairly career oriented members of the female physics population refer to themselves as “girls.”

I’m not saying there’s anything wroing with that. I just find it to be a curious choice. To me, personally, the word girl in this context gives undue emphasis to the aspects of femininity which associate it with immaturity and appearing to be young. I’ve known feminists in the past who object to “woman” because it contains the word “man.” Thus the neologism “womyn.” Nonetheless, I usually think of female peers who identify as female as being women and was curious as to what any actual members of the female population thought on the matter.

I had an appointment this morning to get two root canals–one on a tooth that was badly damaged in a bicycle accident when I was young, and the other on a neighboring tooth. As it turns out, the doctor I saw who was actually to perform the proceedure took several x-rays and poked and prodded as dentists (and endodontists, it seems) are wont to do and decided that I only needed one for the damaged tooth and that the other one might just be hurting because its proximity to the actual problem. Those were some pretty good words to hear, let me tell you. Everything seems to have gone well and I feel pretty good for the time being (although my particular circumstances also usually involve a painful flare-up a couple of days afterwards, apparently).

Anyway, the interesting thing about this particular adventure in oral proceedures was in making the appointment. Now I have no idea why, but when I asked the receptionist for the earliest possible appointment, she first told me Thursday at 1pm. I’d have jumped on that, but then she added later that there was another at 9am. There could be any number of reasons for phrasing it that way, but I made a mental bet in my head for $10 that the earlier 9am appointment was with a female doctor. I was right. Could be a coincidence, certainly, but it just seems somewhat typical, I guess.

The high point of this entire week has been indulging in the privilege of bothering whichever of my fellow TAs happen to be on the floor with all the undergraduate labs. Honestly, it’s given me fuel for introspection. Also, while eating an early dinner this evening so I could make it to the department colloquium which was followed by teaching a lab and not run all night on an empty stomach, I indulged in a bit of reading–a book of essays by Ursula K. Le Guin, particularly a commencement address she once gave at a university. The ideas presented within were not new to me, but I’m somewhat curious as to why I hadn’t given them more thought.

Having dispensed with that background, I’ll get to the point. Language is gendered. Of particular interest to me right now is the idea of success–which, according to Le Guin, requires someone else’s failure. I would like to have a successful career–which, taken by itself, is actually a very masculine statement. Feminine goals are usually family-oriented. But if I were to actually analyze what it is I mean when I say, “I would like to have a successful career,” I find that I probably mean something quite different than what is carried by that phrase.

So I’ve attempted to distill what it is I mean. My starting place is probably an even more enigmatic phrase: “I want to share science.” The first two obvious readings of this imply that I want to teach or that I want to publish results, and while both of these are true, they also fail to capture everything I mean. When I say I want to share, I imagine a two-way exchange. I want to provide “science,” or knowledge of science, or my love of science with others. In exchange I’d like to receive from others in kind–I want to learn things which I could not from a book or from working by myself. To me, that kind of exchange is more important than a job at the right university or a paper published in the most prestigious journal.

Even reading the preceding paragraph again, I find that it sounds a little bit silly to me. But why should it? Why should my career goals have to revolve around the exaltation of me? I see no compelling reason why the sharing of knowledge should be first associated with the ritualistic process of foisting curricula on uninterested students, which seems to be the general expectation of what a career in education should be. The anecdotes I supply to rest my case for this evening are R. Buckminster Fuller, who made a living by patenting inventions he suspected people in the near future would want or need without ever promoting them. The second is the Sharer culture from the wonderful science fiction novel A Door Into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski whose language reflected this concept much better than English can, apparently.

A link over at Skepchick directed me to a couple of posts on Thus Spake Zuska on gender in engineering, and another on gender in science blogging.

In the later post, Zuska says

Study after study has shown that when gender is not explicitly identified or identifiable, most people (men and women) tend to assume the gender is male.

And from what I know this is completely true. The “default” gender is male. Masculine pronouns are even the grammatically correct gender-neutral pronoun (for an interesting take on gendered-pronouns I recommend an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin called “Is Gender Necessary?”, specifically the 1987 redux, which addresses one of her earlier novels and my favorite, The Left Hand of Darkness). There is a little bit of a non-scientific social experiment you can do yourself that was once performed by the professor of a sociology class I took in college on the class itself.

The professor held up a copy of the course text-book and announced that someone had left it in the room after class the previous Monday, and that there was no name written anywhere inside the book. He finished this announcement with the request, “Whoever the owner of the book is, she needs to come see me during break to retrieve it.” The class met weekly for three hours, so there was a short break halfway through, but the part that was supposed to illicit a response was his use of the female pronoun, especially because of the unknown sex of the books owner.