Today’s xkcd:
Unfortunately “doing it so hard” often means “doing it twice as hard as the guys just to prove you deserve to be there and you’re not just filling a quota.” But us lady scientists can do it, and it’s getting better and better.
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This is why XKCD is second only to facebook on “Websites I rabidly browse through”. Right after it comes Hark, A Vagrant!
My best Bio professor was a “lady scientist” and it’s because of her that I understand how my body works. I’m hoping that her research on placenta hormones leads to some understanding of preeclampsia. (This wasn’t a connection I had made until I was hit with it two years ago.)
Don’t forget Rosalind Franklin, who should actually be credited with discovering the structure of DNA. Go women scientists!
This blog post showed up in my rss feed before the xkcd comic did. Jen is clearly a witch.
Hi Jen,I was lucky enough to see your speech at the Kamloops Atheist Convention this weekend. Outstanding presentation! Keep up the good work!Cathy
I doubt that. I think she’s much too sensible to take the weight-loss thing to the extreme of weighing the same as a duck.
I totally read the inset panel in Stephen Colbert’s voice! :D
Today’s girls should be inspired by today’s woman, in my opinion. Looking to the past makes it seem like there are obstacles in the way for women when in the majority of the modern world they don’t exist any more. The main issue as I see it is about paying attention to the women who are out there doing science now. Get them in the media or noticed on the blogosphere. Like; http://womeninplanetaryscience… Second Link: http://blog.sciencegeekgirl.co… Third Link: http://twistedphysics.typepad…. fourth link: http://www.stagesofsuccession…. 5th link: http://sciencehastheanswer.blo…. How many do you know? And how many manage to get noticed?
Sure, radium kills you, but if it makes zombies, perhaps we should rethink our “avoid exposure to radium” rules.
I figured I’d see this here… I just finished posting on my facebook that this would be going in my office right before I came. Full of win.
It’s a big duck.
Best science teacher I ever had was a zoology professor at Oklahoma State in the 1980’sshe was also responsible for my becoming a pro-choice feministshe taught a freshman biology course, even though a full professor like her didn’t have tonDr. Margaret Ewing, you rock! Go Women Scientists! Hang in there Jen! your blog rocks!
Except a lot of obstacles still do exist and it’s deeply disingenuous to pretend they don’t simply because things have gotten better.
*cough*that’swhatshesaid*cough*^.^More seriously, I need to collect some of this kind of stuff. My daughter, being autistic, still seems to be have difficulty wrapping her mind around the fact that being “a baby’s mom,” which she is becoming rather fixated on now that she’s found the where-babies-come-from books, is not a “job” that displaces other jobs, so I need to stock up on antidotes. (Her spending a lot of time around my mother, who is insanely defensive about her own life choices even though she’s clearly been harmed by them, while I’m in school, probably isn’t helping.)
I’ve always wondered how it is that women could always be the next Marie Curie, but never the next Einstein (and men aren’t the next Marie Curie either). When a man is going to be the next Einstein, that’s seen as just meaning “the next super-smart physicist”, not “the next really prominent male scientist”, which is switched around from what it means to tell a woman she can be Marie Curie.
When I was an undergrad physics major, one of my male classmates said, “At least you won’t ever have to worry about getting a job.” That was my first experience with the whole “quota” issue and it pissed me off beyond belief. That was in 1993. Sorry to hear that problem still exists. The thing I really love about this comic is that it allowed me to quote Zombie Marie Curie on facebook this morning. Win!
I would argue that being a primary caretaker of a child (regardless of one’s gender) is a job. Sure, some people work more than one job, but raising kids is some pretty intensive (time and emotion wise) labor.
The point is that she talks as though being a parent, or at least a mother, and having a paying job is an either/or prospect. That’s worrisome.
Yeah, my roommate is in bio and he gave me a quick rundown of how tough it has been in that field. Men actively working to prevent women from getting the Nobel Prize. Terrible.
Hey Jen (or anyone else here..)–if you want a cool book very closely related to this–get the book written by an old High School Friend–Julie Des Jardins–named “The Madame Curie Complex”–which is all about the role of Curie as a scientist and the gender/politics stuff that went with it–but which also contains the stories of numerous other female scientists… Julie got her history Ph.D from Brown and the book is quite good.. (speaking as someone who got his Ph.D in the History of Technology (and Science) from UW-Madison…)…You can get the book directly from Feminist Press…http://www.feministpress.org/b…
I’d like to point you to the story of my mom. When she was an obstetrical resident at Stanford, she got pregnant. She was pressured to resign but fought back. She now has 2 adult daughters, one of whom is applying to med school (and me, about to get my masters), and a thriving private practice. Oh ya, and she opened that practice when I was 6 months old.http://books.google.com/books?…
I actually gave up on a career in a certain male dominated field after a lot of struggling including interviewers very clearly being surprised that a person with breasts was even applying (I have on multiple occasions had a strong feeling if my name was Susan I wouldn’t have been called in for an interview). I like my new better-paying career in a female-dominated field even better though.
I admit to having mixed feelings about this one. To be sure, it is problematic that Marie Curie is considered the go-to token female scientist. There are, indeed badass female scientists all around. On the other hand, Marie Curie gets singled out for a reason. The impact of her work on science is broader (atomic physics to medicine and everything in between) and deeper than any other scientist I can call to mind. If there was never such a thing as sexism, nobody would tell budding young scientists that they could be Einsteins; they would just tell the boys they could be like Marie Curie, too. In the pantheon of scientific superheroes, she is the goddamn batman.It is a problem that female scientists are not better known. The number of women scientists that I could name is embarrassingly small. But when people are asked to name a female scientist, I feel like maybe it should be her name that pops up first. Why? Because her name should be at the top when people are asked to name *any* scientist. The problem is that she’s considered a token or a formality, when in reality she represents what every scientist should aspire to.
It is also deeply disingenuous to downplay the advancements that have been made in order to dramatize the situtation. If there is sexism in the scientific world, it should be dealt with, but it should be done by analyzing the data scientifically to decide what is really happening rather than by making it sound as horrible as it was in the past, which is sort of what the comic does.
Yes there is some sorry parts in the history of science. Things have certainly improved since the time of Marie Curie so hopefully the girls of today won’t have to work twice as hard as the boys, though we should continue to analyze the situtation to make sure the genders are treated the same.
This is a good point.
Why not mention more recent notable female scientists?The most notable one I can think of at the moment is Lynn Margulis. Back in the 1960’s, she had revived the endosymbiosis theory of the origins of mitochondria and chloroplasts, structures inside eukaryotic cells. It states that they are descended from bacteria that were “eaten” by their hosts’ ancestors something like 1.5 billion years ago or thereabouts. She later made similar claims for other structures, like flagella being derived from spirochetes, and she also criticized “neo-Darwinism” for being too competition-oriented — “Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking” (cooperation).She faced a lot of resistance, like unwillingness to publish her papers on the subject, but by the 1980’s, gene sequencing and other such research had convinced the rest of the scientific community that mitochondria and chloroplasts were indeed the result of endosymbiosis. From what their genes are closest to, mitochondria are descended from alpha-proteobacteria and chloroplasts from cyanobacteria. But nobody’s claimed to have found lots of spirochete genes associated with eukaryotic flagella.So she’s sort of like Fred Hoyle, it must be said.