The attempts to shut women down continue [View all]
This short article is a bit confusing, but is have interesting stats and is a great blog
Two women who have been the subject of floods of contemptuous and dismissive abuse as part of their public life write about their experiences and point out that their experience is the cultural norm, not any outlier experience.
British academic Mary Beard in the London Review Of Books: The Public Voice of Women (summary by Caroline Davies in The Guardian)
SF writer (and past SFWA vice-president) Mary Robinette Kowal: Me, as a useful representative example
Tangentially I am reminded of many pieces I’ve been reading lately referencing the datum that once any group contains 17% or so women proportionally, men tend to perceive the gender distribution as equal, and once the proportion of women reaches more than 33% then the perception is that women are dominant in that group. According to further datapoints, the voices we hear and faces we see in public (politics, academia, the professions, the trades, entertainment etc) tend to be 17-25% female too, and this is what we are continually told is proof of a new egalitarian post-feminist status quo.
p.s.
Data! What Data Analytics Says About Gender Inequality in the Workplace
Case in point – 2008 Ms. article on gender inequity in a college athletics department.
Tangentium secundus: I can’t find the exact link now but in several articles I read last week there was mention of yet another case of a drug being recalled from sale because usage by women led to higher risks of side-effects that were not known earlier because research had only been done on male subjects. Apparently hardly anything has changed with regard to testing requirements since this article was written in 2001 – not only are drugs rarely tested on women, they are also rarely tested on children, and even more rarely tested on ethnic groupings outside the mixed-northern-European “norm”. It also jumped out at me that (according to consultant anaesthetic Anita Holdcroft) a UK Medical Research Council-funded study found that only 16 per cent of people who take part in statins trials are women.
Tangentium tertius: general interest article on R&D in pharmaceutical companies and investment hype thereof.
http://hoydenabouttown.com/20140219.16104/the-attempts-to-shut-women-down-continue/