Sexism plagues major chemistry conference: Boycott emerges amid growing outrage

http://www.salon.com/2014/02/20/sexism_plagues_major_chemistry_conference_boycott_emerges_amid_growing_outrage/

by donretag • 12 years ago

12 27 12 years ago

sp332• 12 years ago

Wow that Kress guy is really missing the point. He keeps yelling true things without realizing that they're irrelevant.

worksaf4• 12 years ago

I'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 feel the same if there were no male speakers

Shivetya• 12 years ago

It is very slanted and dares you to disagree, which has become the modus operandi for some groups. Now there is the distinct possibility that someone was purposefully excluded it also is quite possible that with so few in the group that none stood out. Did the query the female members (what, are there like four?) if they wanted to present?

Still, make a competing organization. Don't follow the route of protect the children/etc/etc. Just as bad as highly educated groups are in thinking they are too intelligent to be sexist/racist/etc we don't need strawman arguments or worse.

smrtinsert• 12 years ago

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?

worksaf4• 12 years ago

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.

BrandonRead5• 12 years ago

"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 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. The comment by the dunce about race/body-type/ablism etc completely undermines the position of those speaking out. The people pointing out that women are underrepresented are the same people that will also point out those other imbalances. They are working on their own fight--and yes, there is still largely internalized ignorance of race/gender-identity/ablism and beyond within the movement, but that does not mean they should completely abandon progress just to appease someone that thinks it is only 'perceived bias'. Thoughts?

vezzy-fnord2• 12 years ago

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.

worksaf4• 12 years ago

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.

streptomycin3• 12 years ago

Notably, 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 Gagliardi, who is a professor at the University of Minnesota. “Some 50 years ago the gender distribution in Quantum Molecular Sciences may have been so skewed, but nowadays things have changed.”

To illustrate the point, Krylov maintains the Women in Theoretical Chemistry web-directory, listing “more than 300 female scientists holding tenured and tenure track academic positions or equivalent positions in industry and other research establishments pursuing research in theoretical and computational chemistry, biochemistry, material science, as well as theoretical molecular/atomic physics and biophysics.”

That doesn't illustrate the point unless you compare that 300 against the number of male scientists. If there are 3000+ male scientists in the field, then it's not crazy that only 5-10% of the members/talks are given by women.

300 women is undoubtedly just a drop in the bucket compared to everyone working in "theoretical and computational chemistry, biochemistry, material science, as well as theoretical molecular/atomic physics and biophysics", a ridiculously broad set of topics spanning multiple large departments at every major university (most of which have little business at a quantum chemistry conference, of course).

jellicle2• 12 years ago

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.

streptomycin3• 12 years ago

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?

Argorak2• 12 years ago

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...)

streptomycin3• 12 years ago

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.

canistr2• 12 years ago

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. </sarcasm>

afternooner2• 12 years ago

What are you going on about?

canistr2• 12 years ago

Consider the fact that of the quotes from female chemists in the article, none of them were minorities. They were white women.

vezzy-fnord2• 12 years ago

Salon articles are always to be taken with a grain of salt.

Once again though, this appears to be an issue of equal representation. The classic dilemma is that if you have no speakers belonging to X group, you'll appear to be exclusive. Yet if you hire a few speakers of X group just for the sake of having them, then that becomes tokenism and is hardly beneficial in the long term.

Treating the symptoms is only a band-aid. The condition will exacerbate, unless the root cause (which is a sociological one, in many cases) is examined and treated. One must also evaluate whether it is worth doing so.

VLM• 12 years ago

One 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.

jellicle2• 12 years ago

So 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.

BrandonRead5• 12 years ago

Seriously. A lot of these comments are along the lines of 'Hey, me and my awesome smart hacker brain have all of the evidence, so I don't need to acknowledge this serious issue,' and then the argument dies. It's alright, maybe in another few thousand years or so people will start to use those big hacker brains to take a minute to contextualize the issue instead of brushing it off...

jimbokun• 12 years ago

There may very well be systematic bias against women by the organizers of this conference, but this article does a terrible job making such an argument.

Even anecdotally, citing specific women who have done good work in this very specialized field, submitted a quality paper, and were rejected would go a long way towards corroborating the claim this conference is excluding women. Without knowing how many women submitted papers, and some (even subjective) indication of the quality of those papers, there is no way to judge whatever bias towards women this conference may have.

Also, are all identifying data stripped from the papers before consideration? If there is no way for the judges to even know whether the paper was submitted by a woman, how could they discriminate against her? If this is not the process, it may merit consideration for future conferences.

Sexism plagues major chemistry conference: Boycott emerges amid growing outrage

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