Researchers in the US find that high school students have a low opinion of female science teachers, despite the fact that they are equally effective at getting students to pass exams:
The importance of these findings is that they make it clear that students have developed a specific sense of gender-appropriate roles in the sciences by the end of high school
No wonder girls don’t study science in university.
From Religion or Belief: a practical guide for the NHS, published earlier this month:
Any NHS employer faced with an employee who by virtue of religion or belief refuses to work with or treat a lesbian, gay or bisexual person, or who makes homophobic comments or preaches against being lesbian, gay or bisexual, should refer to its anti-discrimination and bullying and harassment policies and procedures, which should already be in place. Whilst everyone is entitled to their personal beliefs, colleagues and patients should be treated with respect at all times, and should not be subjected to discrimination or harassment on any grounds whatsoever. It should be made clear that such behaviour is unlawful and could result in legal proceedings being brought.
And later, under a section headed “Trans People”:
Discriminatory behaviour towards LGBT people (or indeed against anyone for whatever reason) should never be tolerated under any circumstances.
Of course having rules is one thing: enforcing them is quite another. Given that many NHS Trusts have for years been operating access to treatment policies that are openly discriminatory and blatantly illegal, you have to wonder how much good such a document can do.
In today’s Guardian, Julie Bindel (yes, her again) urges all women to take up “political lesbianism”. And no, that doesn’t mean having sex with women while on protest marches. It just means that you don’t have to, you know, actually have to do anything icky like have sex with women. Just as long as you don’t do anything with men. OK?
Next week Julie will encourage us all to shave off our hair, lay eggs and grow to enormous size. And also pick a nice spot where we can be fossilized for the amusement of future generations and the general befuddlement of creationists.
Hat tip to a friend-locked LJ posting.
Thanks to Ellen Kushner for spotting this one yesterday while I was on the road. It is a long article, and one I’m not entirely sure what to make of, especially as one of the psychologists interviewed in a former associate of J. Michael Bailey. However, a number of things did leap out at me.
Firstly, if you want to understand female sexuality, you need to get women to study it. Men and women think about sex very differently and men, being men, will tend to impose male thought patterns on their female subjects, and therefore get things hopelessly wrong.
Secondly, this brief quote, which everyone who studies gender should take into account:
“The horrible reality of psychological research,†Chivers said, “is that you can’t pull apart the cultural from the biological.â€
And finally, the simple medical fact that female genitalia react to penetration, regardless of whether it is desired or not, as a simple act of self-preservation. The phrase “Arousal does not imply consent” should be burned into the retinas of every judge and jury that ever hears a rape case.
Having got fed up with a having their country run by a bunch of apparently arrogant and stupid men, Iceland is now to get a lesbian Prime Minister. This isn’t the result of an actual election, but rather of political wheeling and dealing in the aftermath of the collapse of the previous government. (The sort of thing that hyperactive Canadians call a “coup”.) However, congratulations are most definitely due to Johanna Sigurdardottir, who will doubtless strike terror into the hearts of religious fundamentalist leaders the world over for a few years.
Hat tip to Bob Hole who also pointed out that The Independent‘s headline was an absurd exaggeration.
Well, we made the pledge, but from what I can see my blogging about it didn’t help much at all. I’m particularly disappointed that no one commented with suggestions as to people I might write about. Of course a lot of you are women in technology – and women SF writers count – so one of you might end up as the subject of my blog post. Let’s remember what this is all about:
Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless.
So we need role models, right? And we are writers too so we can spread the message. I’ve even taken the trouble to spam a bunch of my Facebook contacts (or I tried to, but Facebook crashed on me – if you get the invite, let me know, please). Let’s make a big splash, OK?
From the new White House web site:
President Obama supports full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples. Obama also believes we need to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and enact legislation that would ensure that the 1,100+ federal legal rights and benefits currently provided on the basis of marital status are extended to same-sex couples in civil unions and other legally-recognized unions. These rights and benefits include the right to assist a loved one in times of emergency, the right to equal health insurance and other employment benefits, and property rights.
There’s lots of other LGBT stuff there as well, including this:
President Obama supports the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and believes that our anti-discrimination employment laws should be expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identity.
Got votes, Congressman Frank?
I’ve written before about the effect of complex chemical pollutants on the environment, in particular the “feminization” of animals such as fish and amphibians. There is little doubt that significant changes are being seen in many animal populations, and there is no credible explanation other than chemical pollution. However, the exact mechanism is unclear, as is the level of danger to more complex animals such as humans.
Up until now the favorite explanation for this effect has been estrogen. We know that there is a lot more of it going into the water than there used to be, and it is a popular villain chemical in a number of ways. For male journalists, estrogen is a physical embodiment of girl cooties. It allows them to write about how our environment is being polluted by “girl stuff” that is “turning our sons into sissys”. Puritans of various stripes have put the blame on vain women. If people didn’t use hormone replacement therapy, the argument goes, we wouldn’t have this problem. And the Catholic church has leaped at the chance to identify contraceptive pills as a major pollutant.
What does the science say? As usual, it is complicated. But a new study by some UK scientists suggests another potential cause. Estrogen isn’t the only hormone pollutant around, and the new study looked at what are called “anti-androgens” – that is chemicals that block the effects of testosterone. These chemicals are used in the treatment of prostate cancer, and also in fertilizer. They have also been shown in lab work to be important in producing the sorts of feminizing effects seen in nature.
The new study is statistical. That is, it doesn’t demonstrate actual causality, it simply shows that there is a strong correlation between high levels of anti-androgen pollution and high numbers of feminized fish. Nor does it exonerate estrogen – there could well be some complex effect requiring more than one chemical going on here. But the correlation between estrogen pollution alone and feminized fish is a lot lower.
As ever, there is more work to be done. But if there is a lesson here it is that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions simply because they happen to fit our particular prejudices.
I can’t find the original paper online, but you can read the abstract here.
Here’s something I found through Facebook.
I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.
Can’t be too hard, eh? Except that the campaign was launched on January 5th and it still only has 774 people signed up (775 when my pledge gets authorized). I suspect this is because it was started by someone in the UK and consequently hasn’t hit the female IT community in the USA yet. So let’s get moving, eh? I’m sure that I have a lot of tech workers amongst my readership.
Oh, and if anyone knows of specific people you think I should write about, let me know. It might help give other people ideas too. While this started in IT it doesn’t have to be limited to programmers. Any technology field will do.
The campaign’s web site is here, and the Facebook event page here. Go to it, people. And spread the word.
The latest issue of Steven H Silver’s Argentus (PDF available here) opens with an article by Paul Kincaid. The bulk of the article is a bit confused because it takes a very interesting suggested distinction between hard SF and space opera, and then tries to map that onto the much more complex spectrum of left v right politics, thereby leaving itself open to all sorts of pointless nitpickery. However, I want to take issue with just one short section, which talks about Tom Godwin’s (in)famous story, “The Cold Equations”:
What is significant about the story is not the misogyny. The fact that the victim is a little girl ratchets up the emotional impact, but the stowaway could as easily have been a little boy, the pilot’s wife, the first alien ever encountered. Who she is, is irrelevant.
Well, precisely who she is is irrelevant, but the fact that she is a young girl, not so much. Indeed, Kincaid himself admits as much earlier on when he says:
The little girl would not, could not, harm a fly
In other word, the character of a young girl was chosen as a representative of ineffectual innocence. I suspect that if the stowaway had been “the first alien ever encountered” then John W Campbell would have insisted that Godwin find a way to save it for the good of science. Had the stowaway been the pilot’s wife, a romantic plot might have been acceptable. But a young girl is disposable in a way that another character might not have been.
And if you still think that’s irrelevant, check out this article from yesterday’s San Jose Mercury News on gender selection:
Steinberg, the medical director of the Fertility Institutes of Los Angeles, uses PGD to harvest fertilized embryos, identify their sex after a few cellular divisions, and implant the chosen gender. Chinese and Indian couples from the Bay Area, who pay up to $18,000 per attempt to have a boy, are a major source of his clients, Steinberg said.
The good news is that there doesn’t seem to be much of a trend to abort female fetuses in the US.
Politicians are not always bad. Kudos is due to Thomas Hammarberg, the EU’s Commissioner for Human Rights, for this public statement released today. The key point is as follows:
There is no excuse for not immediately granting this community their full and unconditional human rights. Council of Europe Member States should take all necessary concrete action to ensure that transphobia is stopped and that transgender persons are no longer discriminated against in any field.
That’s nicely unequivocal.
(And to comply with the EU’s rather odd copyright policy: “Also available at the Commissioner’s website at www.commissioner.coe.int”)
A second shadow cabinet member has announced that he is to marry his boyfriend. Presumably this puts the Tories somewhat to the left of the Democrats.
Why is it that whenever a group of women get together to discuss something on the Internet there is always some stupid male, often one who knows nothing about the subject, who insists on butting in and making long, nit-picky posts that he thinks “prove” that all of the women are wrong.
Yes, it is trolling, but it is a very specific type of trolling that appears to be rooted in the belief that two women cannot gather together and have a discussion without needing a man to tell them what to think. Has any feminist writer invented a term for this?
Lavina is beautifully written, as we expect from Le Guin, but it had me puzzled while reading it. The Afterword solved a lot of my confusion because it became clear that the book was Vergil fanfic. What I mean by that is that Le Guin is a big fan of the poet and wanted to write more fiction set in his “universe” and using his characters. That’s essentially what fanfic is, but of course Vergil is way out of copyright and Le Guin is a much better writer than most fanfic practitioners. It does mean, however, that the book will probably mean much more to you if you too are a Vergil fan.
The other thing that puzzled me was that the book is very strong on traditional gender roles, and in places rather negative about gay men. Obviously there’s the setting to consider, but Le Guin is smart enough to know that you don’t have to match history if you don’t want to. Anyone else find the book strange from the gender point of view?
I had been intending to ignore the Pope’s recent rant on saving humanity from “homosexual or transsexual behavior”. It is, after all, rather difficult to take lectures on gender conformity seriously when they come from an old man with a habit of wearing dresses in public. However, I then discovered this entertaining article in The Guardian.
From it I learn that homosexuality only became a crime in England because Henry VIII was looking for some sort of dubious behavior that was common amongst Catholic clergy so as to have an excuse for persecuting them.
And the article leads off with a magnificent quote from HL Mencken who described puritanism as the, “haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be happy.”
I note, however, that the The Guardian cites Mencken as being specifically critical of religious puritanism. What little I know of the man suggests to me that he took a rather broader view of what puritanism was, and would be just as critical of the sort of political puritanism of which Guardian journalists (and indeed journalists in general) are all too fond.
I’ll leave you with a rather longer quote from Mr. Mencken:
The Puritan, of course, is not entirely devoid of aesthetic feeling. He has a taste for good form; he responds to style; he is even capable of something approaching a purely aesthetic emotion. But he fears this aesthetic emotion as an insinuating distraction from his chief business in life: the sober consideration of the all-important problem of conduct. Art is a temptation, a seduction, a Lorelei, and the Good Man may safely have traffic with it when it is broken to moral uses—in other words, when its innocence is pumped out of it, and it is purged of gusto.
I like to think that he would have been an enthusiastic supporter of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
The Attorney General believes that all men (and women) are created equal, regardless of what religious fundamentalists might say.
The authors of the state Constitution, he said, did not intend “to put a group’s right to enjoy liberty to a popular vote.”
Quite. Not to mention pursuit of happiness.
Our trip into San Francisco yesterday evening passed through Borderlands and consequently I was at last able to get a copy of my friend Marcus Ewert’s book, 10,000 Dresses. This is probably the world’s only children’s book about a transgender child. Quite why the Forces of the Patriarchy are not calling to have it banned I don’t know – I’m sure that Marcus would sell a lot more copies if they did, but for now you can still buy it from Amazon (click on the cover image).
Being a kids’ picture book, 10,000 Dresses is very short and heavy on the art. There’s also a lot of repetition in the text, again as you’d expect. The basic story is as follows: Baily spends her nights dreaming of fabulous dresses, but her mother, father and brother keep confusing her by telling her that she’s a boy and isn’t allowed to wear dresses. Of course there is a happy ending, and the art (by Rex Ray) is lovely. Here’s hoping that a lot of kids get to read it.
So, where can I buy a crystal dress that shimmers with rainbow colors in sunlight?
Are sexbots science fiction? Maybe not. Some clever chap in Canada has invented Aiko, billed as a “Perfect Female Companion”. The inventor says that he “envisions a day when Aiko clones can be used as security in airports and other public places, assistants for house-bound disabled people, the elderly and as office assistants.” That’s very noble, but I have a sneaking suspicion what the poor girl is going to end up used for. She’s not yet in mass production and is likely to cost at least $15,000 when she does get to market, but that won’t stop some people. If you are thinking of buying one, here’s Roxy Music with a cautionary tale.
In a move guaranteed to annoy conservative Americans, the UN is discussing rights abuses based on sexual orientation and gender identity. You can read a lot more about the process here, but the thing that really amused me reading it was discovering that there is an organization called the International Day Against Homophobia, or IDAHO for short. – snigger-
Today’s Independent contains a classic science scare story. It alleges that, because of certain types of chemicals that have been commonly used in recent times, the male gender is under threat, throughout the animal kingdom. Some of this is doubtless traditional journalistic scaremongering, but some of the studies on animals are quite startling, for example:
Research at the University of Florida earlier this year found that 40 per cent of the male cane toads – a species so indestructible that it has become a plague in Australia – had become hermaphrodites in a heavily farmed part of the state, with another 20 per cent undergoing lesser feminisation.
Fish are apparently the worst affected types of animals, but the effects have been noted all through the animal kingdom, including in otters, deer, antelope and polar bears. The report on which the story is based concludes:
Feminisation of the males of numerous vertebrate species is now a widespread occurrence. All vertebrates have similar sex hormone receptors, which have been conserved in evolution. Therefore, observations in one species may serve to highlight pollution issues of concern for other vertebrates, including humans.
Hard line feminists will doubtless continue to suggest that there is no biological component whatsoever to gender identity, and I’m not qualified to pronounce one way or another. However, here is an article by a qualified doctor who also happens to be a male-to-female transsexual and who was exposed to one of these “gender bending” chemicals in the womb.
I should note, by the way, that exposure to chemical pollutants is by no means the only possible cause of gender confusion. However, if it happens then it provides firm proof that biological mechanisms can be a contributory factor. And if that is the case then it is further reason to give short shift to those who prefer to believe that all gender variance is a form of sexual perversion.