First up, I've been quoted in Delusions of Gender, the new book from Cordelia Fine, in which she examines the science of alleged sex differences in behaviour. The quote was from this 2008 post about Vicky Tuck, a teacher with odd ideas about the brains of boys and girls. I haven't had time to read the book yet, but a review's in the pipeline.Then yesterday, I found out that I've been the subject of some research.
In this report, we detail research into the representation of women in science, engineering and technology (SET) within online media...
The research involved data collection and analysis from websites, web authors and young web users. We monitored SET content across 16 websites. Eight sites were generalist: BBC, Channel 4, SkyTV, The Guardian, The Daily Mail, Wikipedia, YouTube and Twitter.
Eight sites were SET-specific: New Scientist, Bad Science, The Science Museum, The Natural History Museum, Neuroskeptic Blog, Science – So What? So Everything, Watt’s Up With That? Blog and RichardDawkins.net.
Online science informational content is male dominated in that far more men than women are present... we found that these women are:Without knowing the details it's hard to evaluate these claims, but it's fair to say that some of it rings true.
- Subject to muting of their ‘voices’. This includes instances where SET women are pictured but remain anonymous and instances where they are used, mainly as science journalists, to ventriloquise other people's scientific work.
- Subject to clustering in specific SET fields and website sections, particularly those about ‘feminine’ subjects or specifically about women...
- Associated with ‘feminine’ attributes and activities, notably as caring, demonstrating empathy with children and animals...
- Predominantly White, middle-class, able-bodied and heterosexual.
- Peripheral to the main story and subordinated as students, young scientists, relatives of a male scientist ... we found less hyperlinking of women’s than men’s names in online SET.
- Discussed in terms of appearance, personality, sexuality and personal circumstances more often than men...
- More generally, constructed in ways that relocate them in the private domestic sphere, detract from their scientific contribution, and associate them, more often than men, with the new category of ‘bad science’.
There's been lots of buzz recently about the gender ratio of science bloggers - we're mostly male, who'd have guessed? - and I suppose this would be a good time to chip in. Does it matter?
I think it does, and moreover it's part of a bigger picture. As far as I can see, science bloggers are mostly: male, white, under 40... and almost all of the biggest ones are also native English speakers; I don't know if, overall, English-speakers are overrepresented, because not all blogs are written in English and I only know the ones that are - but English ones get the lions share of the traffic.Back to gender, even in fields such as psychology and neuroscience in which there are lots of female researchers, bloggers are overwhelmingly male. Likewise, a lot of researchers, even those working in English-speaking countries, are non-native-English speakers, but they have an obvious disadvantage when it comes to blogging in English.
So science bloggers are drawn mostly from a narrow cross-section of the scientific community, which is a problem, because it greatly increases the chances of bloggers becoming an "echo chamber", or a clique, neither of which is likely to end well. Diversity is valuable, in this kind of thing, not because it's somehow morally good per se, but because it helps prevent stagnation.
13 comments:
I subscribe to 621 blogs at the moment. As a feminist female, I don't believe that this particular gender divide is important. I read a wide range of science blogs. Several are written by women, or by man/woman teams. I select blogs to read without paying attention to gender. Anyone can become a blogger. If you write well and have something to say, I'll probably find your blog and subscribe. If you continue to have something to say, I'll continue reading it. I don't care about your gender; I care about the information.
Any research of this type that includes you but not any of the outspoken feminist science bloggers such as FSP, Dr Isis, Scicurious, etc. is not worth the paper it's printed on, because they are missing the contribution of women's voices.
No offense to your blog, which is fantastic, just to the research.
It just means that men are blow hards... and bullshitters. They like to spout off with drivel because it makes them feel so.... BIG.
Anon, what are you jealous? LOL! I think women have a life. I'd like to be maternal oneday. Nevermind so much the content I'm usually on the look about for a potential date. I'm shy in real life and I don't do pubs. And the blogosphere is a convenient way to socialize.
I generally find science blogs boring. I like funny blogs. So I can understand why normal folks avert their eyes when it comes to science blogs. Unfortunately there's probably more traffic to Lindsay Lohan's fan blogs.
Hey congrats Neo! :) I'm such a big fan! When are you releasing t-shirts?? Please sign my forehead! Gush!!!
Nature themselves asked in the 20/20 vision piece earlier this year 19 (someone did not get back to them, I guess) leaders in their field for their visions for 2020. The 19 were all white, 18 of them were male and 18 of them were US Americans - that alone made the feature about as "un-visionary" as it gets.
Software forums tend to be American dominated - therefore Americans are genetically more computer-literate.
Rock music forums are mostly male - and women there aren't called women, they're 'Rock Chicks'.
On linguistics forums gay men are more likely to be out - so the gay gene also codes for interest in language, but not for women.
Unless...just possibly, history and culture have some small influence. A shocking thought, I know.
Blogging is something that anyone can do. There are few barriers; certainly less than in, say the work place. I used to run a music blog, and found that most of the other bloggers where white males. But what can you do about it. If no none white males chose not to blog en masse, then I suppose that's just the way it is.
Actually, this research has some hold on reality.
Senior staff at a typical university is mostly white, male researchers. And overwhelmingly so.
Niv - But bloggers are generally drawn from the junior staff, which makes it more surprising. At PhD student / junior post-doc level in neuroscience & psychology, there are noticeably more women than men. The ratio gets more male as you get more senior though. Which may be an age rather than seniority thing.
I'd be curious about factors that could be related to gender-based roles, rather than looking at gender specifically; i.e., the same ones that are associated with women's leaving the tenure track in sciences, etc., such as having children. Among the sci-blogging community, how many bloggers have children or serve as the primary caregiver or do the most in the way of child rearing and household-related responsibilities? My own experience tells me that all the drive, knowledge, and writing compulsion in the world sometimes is no match for the demands of being the parent who does the larger share of the parenting responsibilities.
Thus, for me, a question has always been, how many people who blog steadily and well do so while also carrying primary parental and household responsibilities? Will there be a fizzle in women-based science blogging with childbearing, just as there seems to be a slowdown on the tenure track? How do male bloggers stack up with these factors? Is the "gender" discrepancy in blogging about the gender, per se, or about other gender-bias factors? And does it matter? Does the voice matter, the perspective in interpreting the science, or is it the science alone that counts? I think the perspective matters.
Kapitano, I don't know about anglo male.. I encounter more asians online. I think it might be a language thing.
Excuse my crudeness but generally asians know their technology back to front.. some live in the virtual world now.
In Asia the average kid makes their own computers. If I need stuff like codes, programs, hacks.. I go asian. There's more to life than Microsoft or Google.
To encounter a anglo male online proportion to others is rear. I don't think technology is second nature or culturally chic in anglo populations yet.
1. Congratulations on being quoted in Delusions of Gender! That's awesome.
2. Isn't "Watt's Up with That?" a global-warming denialist blog?
3. Though it's no surprise to me how male-dominated science/skeptical blogging is (it comes up regularly on feminist science/skeptic blogs), I am kind of surprised by the stuff you quote about how women's writing on science-related topics (or writing *about* women scientists and their work) differs from men's. Some of it wouldn't surprise a seasoned feminist --- fewer links/citations of women researchers, irrelevant discussion of women researchers' looks, family/love life --- but a couple of them did surprise me: the thing about women writers clustering themselves (or being shunted) onto the science-blogging equivalent of "women's pages", and also the thing about women's writing being more likely to be about another person's work.
I'm one of the authors of the research report. It will be published very soon and if you'd be interested to find out more then we're having a launch on 2nd December at the Institute of Physics in London. The details are here: http://www.theukrc.org/events/2010/12/the-research-report-launch
Please RSVP to Isma Batool at i.batool@theukrc.org if you want to come. It would be great to be able to carry on this discussion face to face.
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