Would have been to nice to see some quotes from a woman who was also a minority. But clearly ethnic/racial diversity isn't a problem for this conference.
What are you going on about?
Sexism plagues major chemistry conference: Boycott emerges amid growing outrage
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Re: Sexism plagues major chemistry conference: Boycott emerges amid growing outrage
#12I'm not convinced there is a problem. It sounds like some women seized upon this conference as an opportunity to point out a perceived bias. The article is clearly written to suggest that you are either with us or against us and I take issue with that. The academic content of that kind of conference should not be limited by a speaker's gender, even if that means there are no women speakers. Just to be clear, I would…
If there were no male speakers you would think there was no bias? It just happened that every female scheduled had something truly "scientific" to talk about, but the available men had none?
There is no guarantee that just because there are scientists of X gender in a field that they will have something important to say at Y point in time. It may seem suspicious, but I still don't see any proof of sexism.
Re: Sexism plagues major chemistry conference: Boycott emerges amid growing outrage
#13I'm not convinced there is a problem. It sounds like some women seized upon this conference as an opportunity to point out a perceived bias. The article is clearly written to suggest that you are either with us or against us and I take issue with that. The academic content of that kind of conference should not be limited by a speaker's gender, even if that means there are no women speakers. Just to be clear, I would…
"Perceived bias" You are ignoring a larger history and the institutionalized sexism that currently exists in all sects of government, industry, and society as a whole. Of course you would feel the same if there were no male speakers, because men haven't had to suffer through centuries of exclusion, therefore it would not threaten the position of men. When you take a deeper look at the issue and realize that we have t…
To say that having a conference which does not represent a certain group threatens the position of this group is hyperbolic.
When you take a deeper look at the issue and realize that we have the utility to create a gender-balanced (and gender-fluid if you want to trim some more ignorance) society, it is upsetting that yet another conference has no female speakers.
Your comment on "trimming some more ignorance" in relation to postmodern gender theory does not speak well. I'm not sure what you even mean by a "genderfluid" society. Your statement implies that gender is learned rather than innate, which if John Money's (the person who pioneered this hypothesis) research is anything to show, is dubious.
Re: Sexism plagues major chemistry conference: Boycott emerges amid growing outrage
#14One interesting observation is a conference is "major" despite forbidding / excluding (in theory) half the worlds chemists. And more important than excluding mere flesh and blood, they're excluding half the worlds ideas and research, right?
Some google work provides:
http://www.bls.gov/ooh/life-physical-and-social-science/chem...
which claims 96200 chemists employed (just in the USA).
The "little boys club no girls allowed" has 100 all male members worldwide. Lets assume there are 10 chemists worldwide for each chemist in the USA. So this is a major conference because 0.011% of chemists are in the "boys only clubhouse". The other 99.989% of chemists might or might not be sexist, but definitely don't care about the conference.
This might be a partial explanation for the apathy about the issue.
Re: Sexism plagues major chemistry conference: Boycott emerges amid growing outrage
#15I'm not convinced there is a problem. It sounds like some women seized upon this conference as an opportunity to point out a perceived bias. The article is clearly written to suggest that you are either with us or against us and I take issue with that. The academic content of that kind of conference should not be limited by a speaker's gender, even if that means there are no women speakers. Just to be clear, I would…
"Perceived bias" You are ignoring a larger history and the institutionalized sexism that currently exists in all sects of government, industry, and society as a whole. Of course you would feel the same if there were no male speakers, because men haven't had to suffer through centuries of exclusion, therefore it would not threaten the position of men. When you take a deeper look at the issue and realize that we have t…
I am not ignoring anything. This particular conference was not called to address historical issues with gender favoritism. This is a scientific / academic conference dealing with actual ongoing research not related to gender studies. If there is a woman in this group that has something relevant to speak about she should definitely be considered but I don't think that the controlling board should be required to select a woman just to make the speaker list look statistically better to activists.
They are free to boycott the conference though I do not think they are doing themselves any favors. They will only cause those not involved in this gender conspiracy to lose patience and empathy with them.
Are there biased men AND women out there? Yes. Are they in complete control of all current events? No.
Re: Sexism plagues major chemistry conference: Boycott emerges amid growing outrage
#16Notably, there are only four female scientists among the 110 living members of IAQMS, which elects new candidates by internal vote. Ten out of 102 talks during the previous three conference were given by women, and only two female chemists have been awarded medals over the past decade, according to the instigators of the boycott. “These numbers do not reflect the proportion of women active in the field,” said Gagliar…
Women get ~40% of the doctorates in chemistry. The field is unbalanced, but not that unbalanced.
Which is more likely: a traditionally-male field full of old white men has adapted exactly in step with the changing gender makeup of their field, OR it has not?
It's not as if we've never seen this dynamic before.
Re: Sexism plagues major chemistry conference: Boycott emerges amid growing outrage
#17Notably, there are only four female scientists among the 110 living members of IAQMS, which elects new candidates by internal vote. Ten out of 102 talks during the previous three conference were given by women, and only two female chemists have been awarded medals over the past decade, according to the instigators of the boycott. “These numbers do not reflect the proportion of women active in the field,” said Gagliar…
I like the statistics based approach to this.
But it answers less questions than it poses: e.g. given that statistics says that there are always outliers, how come that the outlier "a lot more women than expected by statistics on this conference" is almost never found, while the other outlier is often?
(chemistry, by the way, is a field that has an equal gender ratio at start in some countries: http://www.rsc.org/Education/EiC/issues/2012May/Yellowlees-w...)
Re: Sexism plagues major chemistry conference: Boycott emerges amid growing outrage
#18Notably, there are only four female scientists among the 110 living members of IAQMS, which elects new candidates by internal vote. Ten out of 102 talks during the previous three conference were given by women, and only two female chemists have been awarded medals over the past decade, according to the instigators of the boycott. “These numbers do not reflect the proportion of women active in the field,” said Gagliar…
I like the statistics based approach to this. But it answers less questions than it poses: e.g. given that statistics says that there are always outliers, how come that the outlier "a lot more women than expected by statistics on this conference" is almost never found, while the other outlier is often? (chemistry, by the way, is a field that has an equal gender ratio at start in some countries: http://www.rsc.org/Edu…
But it answers less questions than it poses: e.g. given that statistics says that there are always outliers, how come that the outlier "a lot more women than expected by statistics on this conference" is almost never found, while the other outlier is often?
That just poses another question: how do you know your premise is true?
chemistry, by the way, is a field that has an equal gender ratio at start in some countries
FWIW, this isn't a general chemistry conference, it's a rather mathy one.
Re: Sexism plagues major chemistry conference: Boycott emerges amid growing outrage
#19Notably, there are only four female scientists among the 110 living members of IAQMS, which elects new candidates by internal vote. Ten out of 102 talks during the previous three conference were given by women, and only two female chemists have been awarded medals over the past decade, according to the instigators of the boycott. “These numbers do not reflect the proportion of women active in the field,” said Gagliar…
Women get ~40% of the doctorates in chemistry. The field is unbalanced, but not that unbalanced. Which is more likely: a traditionally-male field full of old white men has adapted exactly in step with the changing gender makeup of their field, OR it has not? It's not as if we've never seen this dynamic before.
Women get ~40% of the doctorates in chemistry. The field is unbalanced, but not that unbalanced.
This isn't a general chemistry conference, it's a quantum chemistry conference. I don't have any particular knowledge of the field, but I expect it's like I've seen at biology conferences. Tons of women in conferences on certain topics, but usually not the ones involving lots of math.
Which is more likely: a traditionally-male field full of old white men has adapted exactly in step with the changing gender makeup of their field, OR it has not?
I don't understand the question. You're asking if it's likely that the gender ratio of the field has moved in lockstep with the gender ratio of the field? Isn't that tautologically true?
Re: Sexism plagues major chemistry conference: Boycott emerges amid growing outrage
#20So this post has been deleted by the mods (or flagged out of the top few hundred posts), in less than a hour.
Honestly the best thing HN could do for its community today would be to remove permanently remove flagging privileges from every single user that flagged this article.