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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?
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Although I do have to query your use of "gentleman" to describe Dave.
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When is Dave not a gentleman? I have yet to witness this phenomenon.
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But yes, agreeing with the other commenter; you look like you are alert and engaged and authoritative, not like you don't belong. I'm still going to have that song in my head all day, though.
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Flippancy aside, my first two thoughts were:
a) ayup, never going to Eastercon
b) I wonder if you'd have better gender balance at a science panel at an Asian convention. I'm inclined to think so because I haven't observed the same focused funnelling of women into the arts and men into the sciences in the Asian cultures I'm familiar with as there is in the UK/US. But, y'know, anecdata.
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Regardless of his efforts, I think it's sort of depressing that it takes special effort to make up a diverse panel, and that last-minute panels tend to default to white guys. That's not the fault of the organizer, but it says something about society, I think.
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And yes, it does say something about society - and I totally agree it's sad.
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It's a shame I didn't have a shot of the audience to counterpoint this one, as it was much better balanced in terms of gender (though not race). Which would seem to indicate that "hard science" fiction writers and fans have achieved more parity than actual scientists in the UK. Although, as you say, this is a single instance and hence anecdata.
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Anecdotally, the first (so far only) con I went to,
So yeah, I wonder. Although I think the connection between science and SF probably affects it also, and I'm not even sure I understand that in the US, so I wouldn't begin to speculate about other countries.
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It says something if the men are the ones who are mostly making money and gaining prestige from science, and the women are doing it as a hobby (reminds me a bit of the thing with how women are crafters and write fanfic for $0 and their work is devalued etc). I mean, I don't know if that's true, but it would be sad -- and unsurprising -- if it was!
Although I think the connection between science and SF probably affects it also
I don't understand what you mean by connection between science and SF -- whether there's any discrepancy between the numbers of women who read SF vs. the number of women who work in science or have a science background, d'you mean?
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Well, and at the time, my science job was a science education job, which is underpaid and largely women, sooo. I mean, a lot of male SF fans are not scientists or science background folks either, but I kind of wonder what the relative percentage is. I do vaguely recall that the (boring, not very good) science programming at that con was all men, but I may be misremembering since I nearly fell asleep and left in the middle of a couple presentations.
(The panel on writing fight scenes also showed some...uh...interesting gender dynamics, although I don't recall them now.)
I don't understand what you mean by connection between science and SF -- whether there's any discrepancy between the numbers of women who read SF vs. the number of women who work in science or have a science background, d'you mean?
Hmmm, let me see if I can remember what I was thinking at the time--I don't want to speak for
So I guess what I would wonder--and it might well vary by culture--is how SF and science and regarded as interests by the average person. Is liking science considered nerdy or within the normal range of hobbies/careers/interests? Is liking SF considered an ordinary interest or way out there weird? And also how SF is regarded by scientists in the culture--do other scientists look at you funny if you admit to reading SF, or do they all have shelves of it at home?
And I'm not entirely sure how that plays out in the US, so I have even less idea how it would play out elsewhere, but I suspect that might also intersect with gender in terms of panel composition, IDK.
If that makes ANY sense at all, which I'm not sure it does.
(I do kind of wonder if female scientists in Asian countries get the "Woah, you're a scientist? But math is so hard for women!" reaction all the time. My impression from test scores and so on is that there doesn't seem to be the same set of underlying societal assumptions about aptitude, but I obviously don't know.)
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Ah, that's really interesting! Thanks for explaining. It makes sense, and I also do not know the answers. Though speculating would make for a fun conversation!
I do kind of wonder if female scientists in Asian countries get the "Woah, you're a scientist? But math is so hard for women!" reaction all the time.
I don't think so, but am not scientist in Asian country so couldn't say for sure. But -- just from my experiences growing up -- I'd say the expectation that boys will outperform girls in the maths and hard sciences is less, hm, intense/pervasive? I think it must still be there because when I got to uni men still dominated in the engineering and sciences courses among my primarily-Asian friend groups. They just didn't outnumber the women AS much as they did among Westerners.
Of course, the additional layer of context is that many of the Asians I was friends with spoke English as a second language. Maths and engineering and subjects like that are seen as being easier for people who don't like writing essays, and most of e.g. the Mainland Chinese people I knew at uni were either mathematicians or engineers. So, y'know, I don't know what the gender balance in the maths and engineering fields are like in Mainland China, whether there's even more of a bias towards men.
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*nods* You're talking about the UK? Because yeah, I would expect it to be different in more of an expat situation. It's pretty similar in the US.
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Also anecdata, but my experience of science conferences/anything in Singapore has also been dominated by white men. But it might just be a S'pore thing, given how much we spend on bringing migrant talents in.
Also racism. That.
I agree with the less gendered funnelling of people into the arts/sciences. That being said, I think the disparity round these parts (as in home parts) shows up more clearly at the top than it does in the UK/US, because we are so bad at supporting female leadership/scholarship.
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I think the disparity round these parts (as in home parts) shows up more clearly at the top than it does in the UK/US, because we are so bad at supporting female leadership/scholarship.
Interesting! My impression is just the opposite.
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Yep. Not the marching-in-the-streets EDL kind. The subtly institutionalised kind that is incredibly difficult to fight because the people who perpetuate it don't think it exists and/or are incapable of recognising it in others and themselves.
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I would be really glad to see a young woman on a panel about science-related things. Of course I'd be gladder to see more women and more diversity in general but, the current climate being what it is, I would probably walk in expecting to see four ageing white guys. I'd be pleasantly surprised and encouraged to see that it's possible to succeed in the field without 'fitting in'.
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Also, dude next to you is wearing a faaaaaaabulous vest. (Er, waistcoat? Vest means something else in BrEng, I seem to recall.)
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(And yes, vest here = your undershirt, I believe.)
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Waistcoat is the correct British English word.
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But...I am glad you are there, and even more glad for the outreach you do and the little girls who want to grow up to be Nanilas. I mean, I honestly don't know what I would have done with my life if I'd thought when I was a kind that scientists were all old white dudes. So, it sucks that panels still look like that a lot of the time, and it sucks that it takes a special effort to make panels more diverse, but you absolutely belong.
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I know it made a difference to me that my physics teacher in high school was a woman. And that my undergraduate research supervisor was, too. And earlier than that, my mum would bring home biographies of famous female scientists. I'm not sure I would have realised it at the time, but in hindsight I can see how important it was.
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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.
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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."
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All the Filipino girls in my university chemistry classes - except one, who was also interested in research - were nursing students.
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I have encountered (literally) hundreds of S'poreans here. That little dance has been done precisely twice.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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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
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.
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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.
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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. :)
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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
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Also it makes me sadface, but hopeful that things have at least changed a bit in the last fifty years or whatever, and hopefully they will keep grinding along bit by bit until someday we get where we want to go.
♥
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The news from the past week - in which the current government apparently plans to make things even harder for poor people by taking away their benefits and not letting them marry non-EU citizens unless they wish to give up their UK residency - is making me think you are right.
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