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Gender and race inequality in science and its wider effects

  
  

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Lurid Archive
09:52 / 24.05.07
I feel that if a thread is started about "gender and race inequality", then if your instinctive response is, "What gender and race inequality? I can't see it," the best thing to do would be not to state this, but to encourage those bringing the issue up to explain where they're coming from. - Pingles

I'd like to say, since I think this is partly directed at me, that I don't think I have been denying inequality and my last post lists several mechanisms by which sexism may operate. It isn't exhaustive, and isn't meant to be, but it hardly counts as a flat denial either. I am actually very interested in what people have to say and from broadening my own understanding of sexism in science, but I'm unlike to learn very much or be convinced if I simply sit back and listen.

Saying that something is set up by and for straight white men is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a normative statement.

Yes, it is. The implication is that the "something" should not be run in order to serve the concerns of straight white men. This also runs into the next quoted piece, which Pingles also thinks is wrong headed,

Then again in my area of math it would be hard, I think, to find a female mathematician who thought that the subject itself was being distorted by male concerns.

In both points I am trying to express the fact that there are a reasonable number of female mathematicians who contribute and significantly add to the subject. They feel it is as much theirs as anyone else's and being told that it is really a straight white man (why not middle class, I wonder?) club, is really a devaluation of what they do. It sounds like an easy dismisal from someone who doesn't particularly value what is being done anyway. And, as I said, there isn't a whole lot of difference between saying that the socio-cultural interests of science have influenced its modes of reasoning to make it hostile to women and saying that women can't do science. In the former, one perhaps also imagines that the science itself must change. My point is that there are women scientists who don't *want* to change the actual content of what they research. This is not to say that the lack of women in academia is not a problem but things aren't particularly simple.

Also, a quick comment on,

I was again thinking along the lines of the example of what to research. I think mathematics is generally conceptualised as something to which gendered or racial concerns do not apply, and I got the impression that this was partly why it was used by Lurid.

Also, the fact that I am a mathematician somewhat influenced my choice. But I was surprised by this objection, since math is hardly the unique science in which we don't have easy access to "gendered or racial concerns". There is theoretical physics, inorganic chemistry, geology, material science, etc. It surely isn't unfair to talk about math here, even if it isn't everyone's favourite example? If the Institute of Feminism is going to declare war on the Institure of Science, then I think there is some value to working out where the border disputes are and where they aren't.

I'm also very interested in hearing more about this,

Thus Lurid's inability to find a female mathematician who thinks mathematics is in any way influenced by male concerns (aside - I'm not sure if I count as a mathematician any longer, but even if I don't, I can easily find you one).

I meant a professional mathematician (Ive no idea if you are one) but I am intrigued all the same. I'd be happy to change the direction of my own research to less patriarchy serving interests, and my perhaps unrepresentative sample of female colleagues would be keen to do the same, I am sure. But maybe this would get too technical and be better addressed in pm.

One last point about social constructivism....I'm not entirely on board with these sorts of arguments, since they seem to follow a familiar pattern. They start by saying that there is a historic and current power imbalance, for instance white male dominance. I agree with that. They proceed to say that sociological effects are part of every human activity. Check. And therefore, any human activity is run for and by the dominant group. And here is where I get a little stuck, since this last step doesn't actually require you to know anything about the thing you are critiquing. So when Nolte starts....Without really knowing too much about the historical development of maths, a case can be made ....I feel I am on familiar ground. Surely one has to do much more than these sorts of general arguments to see how the "logic and quantification" of a subject is influenced by male concerns?

I'm sure I will be pulled up on this as well, but "radical social constructivist philosoph[ies]" aren't widely accepted within science, as far as I'm aware, and there isn't a gendered split on this sort of issue.
 
 
Saturn's nod
12:03 / 24.05.07
therefore, any human activity is run for and by the dominant group.

I think of it more like: collective human activities therefore have a tendency to serve and reinforce the interests of the dominant group unless the people involved in them understand how oppression works and are committed to dismantling the mechanisms that reify privilege.

There may be no difference in maths ability across genders, but still if the teaching and rewards mechanisms have significant gender bias, the allied skills required to learn to use that innate ability to the full will be unevenly required across gender.

If your university tutors and lecturers happen to all be heavily socialized towards behaviour set Y, then it may be more difficult for people with conditioning X to acquire the completely nongendered skill set being maintained, tested and rewarded mainly by people inside behaviour set Y.
 
 
Closed for Business Time
12:59 / 24.05.07
Lurid:
One last point about social constructivism....I'm not entirely on board with these sorts of arguments, since they seem to follow a familiar pattern. They start by saying that there is a historic and current power imbalance, for instance white male dominance. I agree with that. They proceed to say that sociological effects are part of every human activity. Check. And therefore, any human activity is run for and by the dominant group. And here is where I get a little stuck, since this last step doesn't actually require you to know anything about the thing you are critiquing. So when Nolte starts....Without really knowing too much about the historical development of maths, a case can be made ....I feel I am on familiar ground. Surely one has to do much more than these sorts of general arguments to see how the "logic and quantification" of a subject is influenced by male concerns?

And you're quite right. It doesn't do the trick to posit the contextuality of say "pure maths" or nuclear physics and then say "yeah we've got social differentials, therefore we must have effects of those differentials within the formal structures of these knowledge practices", without actually going into the structures themselves and try to imagine alternatives that (and this is the crux) show that certain ways of doing and thinking (and feeling) maths hinge on being f.ex a straight white male, and there are other equally valid (in the technical sense of leading to proofs) ways of doing maths. I'm not a mathematician, so I cannot and will not try to do that.

What I can do however is pose this question to mathematicians of all genders: Is math a) invented or is it b) discovered? If a) I can reasonably expect that someone out there with the necessary knowledge of both math and sociocultural theory can perform the analysis I outlined above. If b) there's not much I can say about the impact of gender upon the development of math and math-dependent sciences. Or is it? Penrose would have it both ways in that he has a platonic-objective ontology of mathematical objects while simultaneously talking about "seeing the validity of a mathematical argument" in a non-algoritmic way. In the end he falls down on the essentialist side in that even though he acknowledges the personal side of the road leading to an a math argument, the truth or lack thereof of that argument is always objective.

This all leads into a debate on the status of social constructivism in science which is central to the topic. To be honest, I don't buy a lot of the "hard" soc-con arguments myself as they lead into a weird and deeply worrying relativism. But that is not to say that a middle way can't be found. I'll read some more Latour before coming back to this. Later, my lovelies.
 
 
alas
14:33 / 24.05.07
there are a reasonable number of female mathematicians who contribute and significantly add to the subject. They feel it is as much theirs as anyone else's and being told that it is really a straight white man (why not middle class, I wonder?) club, is really a devaluation of what they do. It sounds like an easy dismisal from someone who doesn't particularly value what is being done anyway...

I am sympathetic to the roots your argument, Lurid, believe you to be arguing in good faith, and I am very glad that you are committed to continuing in honest engagement with the topic. I get frustrated when, as happened early in the transhuman thread, when I entered the debate and someone felt so threatened by my anger at the way the topic was framed, and probably threatened by the whole sense of being perceived as potentially racist or sexist, that he threatened to lock the thread. Of course that's not what I wanted; but I didn't want to have to apologize either, and, in that case, many people came out and made it clear that it is possible for a place like barbelith to have a real debate about sexism and racism and class issues; they don't close down debate, because there's really only one narrowing and legitimate perspective, but can, in fact, open it up.

(But then again I actually kind of enjoyed the long engagement I was able to have with Shadowsax last summer over the whole fathers 4 justice thing, and was frustrated at some level when that conversation kind of blew up, for a variety of reasons, not all of them his fault, I think, in retrospect.)

So let me be clear to everyone--although I think many of you "get" this--when I say there's racism or sexism going on in a space, I think of it as akin to when the center for disease control alerting the public to an upsurge of a transmissable disease. It's not an insult to the person who has exhibited the illness--they didn't invent racism or sexism, which are always bigger than any of us--it simply means they need to pay attention, they may need some caring outside assistance to deal with the disease, and they need to take care not to infect others, and that all of us need to examine the conditions that may be conducive to the growth and spread of a virus.

So, more common ground, I hope: I suspect that most of us in this thread can agree that as a culture, we do devalue math and science--and intellectual pursuits in general--in our culture, too, even as we depend on them daily, in fact, even as I depend on the fruits of their efforts simply to type this message and send it out to all of you. I have some low-level guilt and anxiety that I use too many machines that I don't fully understand the workings of, and it's tempting at times to devalue work with things I don't understand, in order to make myself feel better. That, too, represents a deep disrespect, which is a serious component of racism and sexism.

Indeed, recently in working with candidates for a position related to cultural diversity on our campus, an intelligent African American woman among them said that she didn't want black and Latino students to be "just bookworms." As someone with a PhD, someone who has written books, I really felt that label as a slap--almost, but not quite the same as when I hear "bitch." It's probably not quite as physically offensive and inescapable as bitch, but it definitely produces a real & visceral reaction in me, because it does attack part of my identity, something I know to be good and valuable in me is being devalued and mocked.

So we all do need to take more care in our speech, to make sure we're not committing other less-recognized forms of bigotry, too, and it's totally legitimate to call that out, I think.

I want to keep discussing this, but I have to run, and I've gone on quite a bit, but I promise I'll be back.
 
 
yami
19:56 / 24.05.07
Hi, I'm id's friend. Id and I had a brief discussion before he posted - he asked me to come here to tell my story, but I've been too busy to join in, and also wanted to see his perspective. As I suspected, he is rather less charitable to my department than I would be.

I'm not saying this to imply that id is wrong and I am right and my institution is just peachy keen dandy. Rather, I was genuinely interested in his perspective because I feel stuck trying to choose between multiple competing narratives of my own unhappiness and departure from academia. There's the one in which I work long hours and never get any nice head-pats for it... and then there's the one where I stay late because I spent all afternoon dicking around on the Internet, and here it is 9:30 and I'm posting to Barbelith instead of making the figures I said I'd have ready for tomorrow. There's the one in which I don't get as much encouragement and support as I would have were I a man, and the one where men are also left to flounder, but for whatever reason they are more likely to persevere in the absence of encouragement and attention (I recognize both these stories as sexism, natch, but the bad guys are significantly different). There's the one where the people who leave my department, or have trouble passing their quals, are mostly women, and there's the one where the department overall has a very good retention rate even among women and the gender balance of the people who do leave is not statistically significant. And so on and so forth, for any gender issue you can imagine. As far as I can tell, these stories are all about equally true.

And this is where the idea of immersion and perspective becomes relevant, I think. There are obvious psychic and professional costs and benefits associated with the stories I tell myself and others about my departure from the program, which mostly point in the direction of framing it as an idiosyncratic conflict and an active decision to seek greener pastures (which I describe with corporate-employment-friendly words like "team environment"). Similar incentives apply, I think, to people who stay on research tracks. IOW, there are many good reasons we don't see more scientists critically analyzing their disciplines/institutions from a feminist/antiracist perspective and it shouldn't be necessary to appeal to inherent disciplinary conflicts (which I commonly see in discussions elsewhere, though in this particular thread it has so far been best represented by Lurid's colleagues, "the argument that science embeds privileged male perspectives is itself a form of sexism that finds it difficult to reconcile women and science").

Anyway. I have my pet theories about gender issues in my field and department, and am easily triggered to rant, but don't have quite enough time for it today. But before I go back to work I want to recommend Londa Schiebinger's Has Feminism Changed Science? to anyone who's interested in "phallogocentrism and science", as Grant put it, and not coming from a place where the word "phallogocentrism" is useful or interesting. I found the book to be a little broader in focus than I was wanting, as she sort of hops around between HR issues and the nature of scientific inquiry without drawing any satisfying connections between the two, but a couple of the chapters are good little case studies of how a feminist perspective significantly impacted the research process in biology. She discusses primatology as an example of "feminist science", in a way that could plausibly be applied to physical sciences where there aren't such obvious gender issues in the research subject. If there is interest, I can try to post a summary of her criteria for "feminist science" when I get home and have time.
 
 
Saturn's nod
08:06 / 30.05.07
Thanks yami, and welcome. The Schiebinger book you recommended was available from the library so give me a few days and I'll hope to have some opinions on it.
 
 
Saturn's nod
08:12 / 31.05.07
Dear me, that Shiebinger book makes depressing reading. Reading the detailed evidence about the depth of prejudice, I am feeling really miserable. It seems my chances of succeeding in science are even smaller than I thought. I have a passion for truth and a love for my subject, I delight in intellectual rigour and I'm always finding ways for my disability not to hold me back too much, but to fight through all that sexism as well? It seems the women who can succeed have high-end human physical strength and stamina, and little requirement for sleep or fun, in order to overcome all that is against them in the professional science world.

I think it's the evidence for internalised hatred of all that is female which is most distressing. One example she gives is of giving a group of scientists the same paper to read, with a different name: a 'male' name, a similar 'female' name and some ambiguous ones including just initials. Everyone, both male and female, judged the same paper as much worse when it had a female name attached, or even when the name had initials that the respondents suspected belonged to a woman hiding her gender.
 
 
Pingle!Pop
10:34 / 31.05.07
[Sorry, Lurid, that I've not replied to you above. I've been meaning to and still intend to, but w*rk-etc-etc. I probably won't manage until next week, and am trying to not slip into poping.]
 
 
Less searchable M0rd4nt
12:45 / 02.06.07
the argument that science embeds privileged male perspectives is itself a form of sexism that finds it difficult to reconcile women and science

I've been sort of hovering round this thread trying to find a way in since it started, and this quote seems to offer some sort of ingress. Whilst I have bitter personal experience of the way sexism in the scientific establishment affects women's career prospects, I have to say that I do feel powerfully oppressed and attacked on a very deep level by certain manifestations of this concept.

I'm not saying for a moment that the scientific establishment and the history of science as a whole have not been affected and shaped by the fact that most of those involved down the centuries have been privilaged and generally male. However, I think there's a tendency now for some feminists to lazily dismiss not just the scientific establishment but the whole of science as without worth because of this.

Science--the intellectual rigour and passion for truth that Saturn's Nod speaks of--is a part of me. I feel injured--actively harmed--when I see it framed as masculine or masculinist. On a purely internal level I feel as if something entirely vital to my being is under attack; if this key componant of me is "male" then I am obviously a faliure as a female; if it is "male and bad" then I am not only a faliure as a female but as a conscious being.

On the external level it manifests principally as a withdrawal of support from female/feminist persons and structures. Attempts on my part to garner support--even simply moral support--in the face of the actual, active sexism I experienced while trying to study a hard-science topic have repeatedly been met with rebuff, rejection, and heavy criticism from self-identified feminists. The general vibe I get is "well, what did you expect?" It's as if I'm seen as tainted--as having sold out, gone over to the enemy; having betrayed the cause by trying to grab a slice of juicy male privilage rather than taking the high road and going into a "female" discipline. I've been given the very strong impression from some individuals that the up-close-and-personal sexism I experienced in pursuit of the hard-science subjects I love is regarded by some feminists as serving me right.
 
 
Saturn's nod
11:12 / 04.06.07
On the external level it manifests principally as a withdrawal of support from female/feminist persons and structures.

I perceive this as a manifestation of sexist oppression. Institutions for women, whether for health, education or professional advancement, are usually poorly funded and given low status: for example disparagement of women dons from women's colleges by male dons in elite male-dominated colleges, and the low status of 'pink collar' professional activities. In comparison, institutions and occupations reserved for men and specifically men's needs are often not distinguished as gendered ('unmarked'), given great social prestige and status, and well funded, including from collective resources by 'gender blindness'.

Attempts on my part to garner support--even simply moral support--in the face of the actual, active sexism I experienced while trying to study a hard-science topic have repeatedly been met with rebuff, rejection, and heavy criticism from self-identified feminists. The general vibe I get is "well, what did you expect?" It's as if I'm seen as tainted--as having sold out, gone over to the enemy; having betrayed the cause by trying to grab a slice of juicy male privilage rather than taking the high road and going into a "female" discipline. I've been given the very strong impression from some individuals that the up-close-and-personal sexism I experienced in pursuit of the hard-science subjects I love is regarded by some feminists as serving me right.

I hear you!

It's my opinion that consciousness-raising was the most powerful technique for catalyzing the social changes that were achieved in Second Wave feminism. I think this is because the specific commitment in those groups - as I have been told about them - was to listening to each other very carefully, with intent to understand the realities of each others' lives and to support each other to succeed an to dismantle the oppressive structures. It's awful that you were (it sounds like) verbally attacked and shamed for even naming your experiences, which is one of the very foundational mechanisms of sexist oppression.

I think the consciousness-raising disciplines of creative listening and collective action have great power. I'm curious about when consciousness-raising groups stopped being the core of feminist practice: I don't think there is any substitute for deliberate and explicit co-training in listening to each other, honouring the reality of each others' experiences, attempting collective understanding of how our experiences are being shaped, and seeking concrete solutions to overcoming oppression.

I don't know how, apart from consciousness-raising, cultural change happens. I think addressing sexism in institutions requires a process of education for all which is most often exhausting to carry out: I think the commonest complaint I have heard from other feminists is I am so tired. It's not surprising that feminists get tired, given the frequency with which ignorance and denial are used to belittle and undermine demands for change on the part of privileged groups.

I love the sexist argument bingo cards that Isadore's been linking up over in Creation (here onwards) because the greater the extent to which we as gender activists can maintain the scholarship that has been already done, the more effective we can be at combatting denial and ignorance and successfully making changes. It's a feature of sexist oppression that classical definitions of 'canon' knowledge remove revolutionary analysis from the selections passed to subsequent generations of students so oppressive values are 'automatically' maintained. It's a triumph if that realisation is used to reshape the ways in which our future scientists and other knowledge professionals are educated. The bingo cards are a fun way for us to maintain the work of previous scholars and build on it for egalitarian knowledge work to flourish in the future.

Perhaps if we had all realised the perfection of our enlightenment women would be immune to the sexist oppression raining down on us and capable of re-educating or deflecting each idiot that crossed our path, but that seems an undue burden to me and I think analyses in which the problem is situated wholly inside women or people of minority ethnicities are tools for keeping women and numerical minorities behind in the stakes of professional success.

I wonder whether the encouraging outcomes of successful consciousness-raising groups - more confident women with good support, specific proposals for change, and highly developed critical thinking skills - could offset the grinding exhaustion of more informal feminist education processes. I have doubts though about whether men in academia who think there is no problem could be persuaded to participate and listen to the reality of women's experience - and I wonder whether such groups could actually be supportive to women in academia to make their experiences of sexism explicit, given the punishments available in professional life for women who do not conform.

It's clear to me that the institutions of academia have been built in an unhealthy culture: the British institution I know best was originally designed for celibate male clergy fully supported by national taxation. Many academic institutions, especially the most prestigious, have been shaped around the needs of upper-class white men with full social care teams and as such do not entirely suit the needs of most modern people of either gender, especially those who have family commitments. It's an act of creative power to reshape workplaces and work practices to suit our human needs and to best serve our intellectual endeavours and the effort it costs me I account as part of my duty to the betterment of the species.

The scientific practices of the early modern period before university colonisation of science knowing - early astronomy when it operated as a cottage industry, for example - were numerically more inclusive of women than when sciences became confined to universities which specifically excluded women. I wonder whether redefinition of public/private space divisions will be necessary to build better science practice for the future, given the uneven gendering of public and private spaces.

I think it's important to acknowledge how the historicity of sciences so far has affected equality of access, in order to build science practices that do not reinscribe injustice. The way our current institutions work has a history, and in many cases that history was founded in explicit exclusion of women, so I think it should not be surprising that action and changes are necessary in order to draw out the full benefit of human capabilities by abolishing gender and racial privileges.
 
 
Evil Scientist
11:23 / 30.11.07
This links across to a post by Nolte in Convo which, in turn, links to a PDF about Sarah Hrdy, an athropologist and feminist. I thought it'd also be relevent to this thread as it underlines the difficulty female scientists face in the course of their research.
 
 
Jester
00:03 / 09.12.07
As I perceive it, there's a huge problem about the level of sexist and racist ignorance casually displayed amongst the majority white men in science.

Although I'm a bit unwilling to write about this, not being a scientist, I think there is more to be said about the impact of sexism and racism on scientific research, and the way scientific facts are interpreted.

First off, a link to an extract from Challenging Racism and Sexism: Alternatives to Genetic Explanations. I can't cut and paste, unfortunately, because it is from a weird Google book search. The jist of the argument is that the language describing the process of egg fertilisation is sexist:

"Ejaculation launches sperm on its dauntless voyage up the female reproductive tract. In contrast, eggs are 'released' or 'shed' from the ovary to sit patiently in the fallopian tubes until a sperm 'penetrates' and 'activates' them. Given that fertilization is an active process in which two cells join together and their nuclei fuse, why is it that we say a sperm fertilizes the egg, whereas the egg is fertilized?"

This seems like a clear case where the male-dominated world view applies a sexist interpretation and story to the neutral facts. This is certainly the narrative that I learned in school. It reinforces and replicates the idea that women are biologically pre-determined to be passive, men active, even down to the level of cells.

Perhaps there are similar examples in maths (as discussed), but it would probably take a mathematician to identify them!

Sorry to link to an audio file, but the relevant bit is at about the 1 hour mark, and I think this episode of the Addicted to Race podcast is also relevant. The last item they discuss is about the motivations behind why so much research is done on the differences between 'the races'. They also make some interesting points about the lack of education on the political implications of doing this type of research, and how clueless one particular scientist seemed when questioned about how close his own research on the genetics behind skin colour got to eugenics.

In some ways this seems like these are even more difficult to deal with than the universally difficult issue of how to end discrimination in the science workplace...
 
 
DecayingInsect
16:22 / 09.12.07
"Perhaps there are similar examples in maths (as discussed), but it would probably take a mathematician to identify them!"

Why should mathematicians do this? What is the specific evidence that the white male oppressor caste has been embedding racism/sexism into the mathematical literature?

On the other hand the AMS, for example, goes out of its way to sponsor a diversity
program.

Many learned societies in the scientific arena have similar projects.

Does that count for nothing? Or would it be more important to revise the allegedly tainted corpus of published mathematics?
 
 
Lurid Archive
17:03 / 09.12.07
Well, to be fair, mathematicians should be open to the idea that sexist norms are embedded in mathematics as currently understood. There is certainly a male dominance in the profession, which you might take as evidence of a bias, but then again you might not. Even asking female mathematicians wouldn't be uncomplicated since there is always the potential problem of false consciousness, or claims of such.

Even jester's quoted example isn't without problems, in my opinion, since it seems to rest on the idea that using "fertilize" as a verb is inherently sexist which seems awfully close to criticising scientists for using English as it is understood, embedding as it does sexist norms. I think you can argue this, but it isn't as straightforward as presented.
 
 
*
17:11 / 09.12.07
What is the specific evidence that the white male oppressor caste has been embedding racism/sexism into the mathematical literature?

I'd like to point out the condescension here. You've mischaracterized the original conjecture (that there might possibly be language in use to describe mathematics that derives from or contributes to gender bias) and created the hyperbole "white male oppressor caste" in order to make Jester's post seem ridiculous.

On the other hand the AMS, for example, goes out of its way to sponsor a diversity program.

It looks like a good step. The AMS would like to recruit women mathematics scholars. They have a special program to do so that averages about 11 and 1/4 female graduate students per year. You have just advanced this, apparently, as evidence that there is no biased language in scholarship published in the field of mathematics. The one thing, I'd venture to suggest, hasn't necessarily got to do with the other.
 
 
Jester
12:38 / 10.12.07
Why should mathematicians do this? What is the specific evidence that the white male oppressor caste has been embedding racism/sexism into the mathematical literature?

I would suggest that it should at least be worth assessing mathematics to see if evidence of sexism and racism crops up, or if the way that theorums are expressed and concieved is influenced by patriarchal/white-supremicist culture. To answer your question with a question, why the reluctance to make this analysis?

If nothing is found, then brilliant. But if bias is found, surely mathematicians would want to correct it - if only in the name of better maths?

I think that the term "white male oppressor caste" is misleading as well, because it assumes that the reason these problems crop up - as in the example of egg fertilisation I quoted - is as simple as the research being done by white men. Although that may well be a factor, the point is that racism and sexism (and other forms of prejudice) run deeply through the way our society is constructed, and influence the way that we all interpret the world.
 
 
Jester
16:11 / 10.12.07
Even jester's quoted example isn't without problems, in my opinion, since it seems to rest on the idea that using "fertilize" as a verb is inherently sexist which seems awfully close to criticising scientists for using English as it is understood, embedding as it does sexist norms. I think you can argue this, but it isn't as straightforward as presented.

I don't think it's really about the use of 'fertilize' as a verb. It's about looking at a process which involves two cells merging, and interpreting it as one cell penetrating the other.

I've actually had a more thorough version of this example explained to me, and although I'm reluctant to dish out third hand knowledge, the basic idea was that both the egg and sperm are active participants in the fertilisation process. A sciency person would no doubt be able to explain this much more effectively!
 
 
grant
18:10 / 10.12.07
Well, they both move from points of origin (testes, ovaries) into the womb, and there's evidence that eggs can somehow "select" suitable sperm - it's not just tadpoles seeking out the right beach ball.

On the other hand, sperm have tails (OK, flagella. Whatever.) and are small, and go into someone else's body (at least in humans - fish and amphibians do it a little differently). I can't quite see a way around that. The division of DNA, though, is a lot more... mathematical? Geometric?
 
 
Lurid Archive
23:17 / 10.12.07
If nothing is found, then brilliant. But if bias is found, surely mathematicians would want to correct it - if only in the name of better maths?

The more difficult questions are to decide when something is found, or even more difficult when we could putatively decide that there is no significant bias. Immediately, when trying to tackle this question you wil bump up against the incommensurability between deciding that bias must exist because of the majority of male mathematicians (or scientists) versus the position that bias doesn't exist because the experts tell you that the content is free from gender bias.

As for the "fertilization" thing, I think that grant has it. Namely, it is arguable and hence not a clear example of bias for my money. I could be wrong, of course, but I am always suspicious of claims of this kind of bias that don't provide a plausible replacement.
 
 
DecayingInsect
16:36 / 11.12.07
Sorry if my post was condescending, but what I mean is something like the following:

supposing you as an academic wish to sponsor a diversity program, like the AMS one,
that has a chance of correcting the under-representation of non-white non-males in the physical sciences.

To do this you will need real money, and if the UK experience is anything to go by
you will be looking at one or more exhausting rounds of calling in favours,
arm-twisting and begging to secure funding.

In making your case would you really want to assemble a litany of allegedly
tendentious excerpts from the published literature? Like the one above? Will that be seen as collegial?
 
 
jentacular dreams
09:49 / 12.12.07
why is it that we say a sperm fertilizes the egg, whereas the egg is fertilized?

I think the problem also stems somewhat from the use of the general term "egg", requiring the adjectives of fertilised or unfertilised to determine the state of the cell. If you use the scientific terminology of ovum and zygote, the problem doesn't exist.
 
 
Saturn's nod
11:09 / 12.12.07
In making your case would you really want to assemble a litany of allegedly tendentious excerpts from the published literature?

You could also use one of the catalogues of evidence for overtly sexist bias enacted by scientists on scientists, for example Londa Schiebinger's book 'Has feminism changed science?' mentioned by yami above.
 
  

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