tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3819620844167690741.post247139121400052964..comments2023-07-01T07:40:30.310-07:00Comments on Biological ANthropology Developing Investigators Troop: Why have Lady Editors? A true story of balanced gender representation. Julienne Rutherfordhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17989351017526826333noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3819620844167690741.post-37389484701178627352014-04-23T12:46:39.728-07:002014-04-23T12:46:39.728-07:00There are large scale historical and cultural fact...There are large scale historical and cultural factors that suggest corrective action is needed to accommodate and accelerate a push toward equity. As Katie Hinde says below, proportional representation is a good minimal goal. I did not argue that it was the responsibility of the workshop organizers to correct all the bias in these fields. Likewise, it wasn't our responsibility to do so. I think our responsibility, minimally, is to put forth panels and publications that reflect the actual composition of the field and when we don't do that, we need to discuss why that is. <br /><br />A related but separate issue is to interrogate why the biases exist. Why do anthropology and psychology - and especially primatology - skew female? Is it because men are implicitly or explicitly excluded from those fields? Is it because women get funneled into the social sciences instead of the "hard" sciences due to systemic undervaluing of the social sciences? There are likely many factors at play, and those are beyond the scope of the discussion at hand. <br /><br />I disagree with your assertion that I personally would argue strenuously that it would be unacceptable for symposia in fields that have an 80/20 male skew to actually have speakers that reflect that representation. I would be pissed if that was the actual distribution and the speakers skewed 90/10 because that suggests bias beyond the larger cultural factors that shaped the 80/20 skew in the first place. I would then suggest that alongside that panel, the organizers and other people in the field have an open discussion about why the skew is so far from 50/50.<br /><br />I am not a nurse but I work in a College of Nursing. Nursing is a profession which historically skews almost entirely female. Is it because men have been actively excluded by the female power structure? Is it because nursing has historically been viewed as "women's work" and thus systemically undervalued? It is reasonable to assume the latter explanation. That said, I can tell you that there are active conversations within the nursing profession at the collegiate level about how to correct the bias, how to encourage more men to join the profession. Because everybody wins. That's the revolutionary thing we're talking about here. Julienne Rutherfordhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17989351017526826333noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3819620844167690741.post-73947362103718168602014-04-23T12:24:31.561-07:002014-04-23T12:24:31.561-07:00What Katie said. What Katie said. Julienne Rutherfordhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17989351017526826333noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3819620844167690741.post-88201119285078509432014-04-23T12:23:00.345-07:002014-04-23T12:23:00.345-07:00I know that many of the men featured in the worksh...I know that many of the men featured in the workshop had very well-established senior female scholars in these fields on their dissertation committees, and many of them have very well-established senior female scholars as current colleagues. (And they are not all the same woman, but actually several!) Thus, the argument that an explicit focus only on senior scholars alone - in this particular field - would have produced such extreme male bias is not supported. That is the blind spot of implicit bias. To your point about "blaming Pablo", I have very clearly contextualized both posts within larger structural issues. Nobody is blaming any single person for the fact that unconscious biases and discrimination exist as powerful barriers to access. That we find ourselves, our friends, our colleagues, our mentors, blindly committing/running into the constraints of implicit bias is worthy of open discussion. That some interpret making the conversation open and attached to actual people that we know as blame is interesting, and also serves, perhaps unconsciously, to further limit the conversation by suggesting those raising the issues are overly sensitive or even vindictive. Julienne Rutherfordhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17989351017526826333noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3819620844167690741.post-21452166910695165862014-04-23T11:30:39.945-07:002014-04-23T11:30:39.945-07:00I think that proportional representation is a mini...I think that proportional representation is a minimal goal. For fields in which the representation is dismal for some groups, featuring a disproportionate number of under-represented groups can contribute to attracting more individuals of those groups to the field. Otherwise it runs the risk of functionally showcasing that this is a field/topic that has a very clear in-group. In primatology the in groups and out-groups generally fall along other dimensions. Lastly, in Building Babies we were balancing a diversity of goals- multiple disciplines, multiple topics, captive and field research, diversity of taxa AND showcasing some of the cutting edge research being done by a lot of junior scientists both men and women. That was our decision-tree. Given those goals that we managed proportionate representation was pretty darn kickass.Katie Hindehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11494692686726618911noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3819620844167690741.post-66915373991446597632014-04-23T09:38:26.171-07:002014-04-23T09:38:26.171-07:00I'm strongly supportive of your efforts to inc...I'm strongly supportive of your efforts to increase female representation in general, but I don't see how this addresses the original commenter's question. Your argument seems to boil down to the suggestion that 50/50 is the wrong target to strive for, because there are many more females than male in anthropology and psychology. But surely you appreciate that this is exactly the same argument people use to defend the status quo in fields like physics and CS. Editors and conference organizers will say things like "well, 80% of the field is male, so of course most symposia are going to be male-dominated." Presumably in that case you would argue strenuously that this is an unacceptable defense, because that gender skew itself reflects deep-seated biases that favor men over women. So why is it okay to use exactly the same argument when there are more females than males in a discipline? Shouldn't you and your co-editors have proactively tried to recruit <em>more</em> males in order to try to correct for the bias in anthropology and psychology? Or is the argument that gender bias can only occur in one direction, and the dominance of females in the latter fields is perfectly acceptable culturally?<br /><br />(To be clear, I don't actually think you've done anything wrong, and support your efforts--I'm just pointing out that you're justifying your actions in the same way that the people who organize male-dominated symposia do--and I take it that that was the commenter's point.)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3819620844167690741.post-36443686106674156552014-04-23T08:56:18.811-07:002014-04-23T08:56:18.811-07:00My impression is that while recent PhDs in the fie...My impression is that while recent PhDs in the fields invited to the conference in question are predominantly female, more established people in these fields are predominately male. For the sake of simplifying the discussion, let’s assume that this discrepancy is entirely due to bias against females. The line-up of the conference in question clearly was focusing on more senior scientists. Let’s also set aside the issue of whether it is a good idea for a conference to focus so much on featuring the old folks. Given these premises, it doesn’t seem justified to say that the population Pablo and the other conference organizers were picking from was predominately female. I’m not sure the population they are picking from is skewed so far to 14%--but also remember that even with random sampling we would get some variation around the population mean. This is not to say that we don't have other more general problems of bias that need to be addressed--but I am not sure it is fair to blame Pablo for these much larger cultural and structural issues.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com