Tierney and Women in Science

One thing that Tierney did not mention in his NYT article yesterday is a recent Harvard Business Review report, which says that although 40% of the scientists and engineers in the early stages of their careers are women, most of those women (52%) will quit a job due to gender-related issues.

The reasons? A major factor is "macho" work environments that isolate women. Indeed, 63% said they had been sexually harassed. Another factor is job requirements that are incompatible with maternity and family responsibilities. Most of the women who left jobs said that they would return if employers addressed the issues that made the jobs untenable for them. Pace Tierney, it's not the case that those who felt compelled to quit did so because they realized they were misplaced in a science/technology career.

What Math Can Do

And what it can't, namely, prove the existence of God.

A former student pointed me to this logical debunking of a supposed mathematical proof of the existence of God. MarkCC has a series on the misuse of logic and math in creationism/ID. Trevor, I think you're right--these could be quite fun to look at in our logic class.

What Mothers Look Like

What Sorts? posted a reminder about the Shape of a Mother site, where mothers of all types post stories and images about their bodies during and after pregnancy. The site was interesting and comforting right after I gave birth to my son.

There's endless information available about pregnancy--and it's often forced on pregnant women by well-meaning family, friends, and strangers--but no one talks about being postpartum. Even with all of the attention that philosophers pay to embodiment, the bodies of mothers is a lacuna.

Title IX, Higher Education, and Science

How can the New York Times ("all the news that's FIT to print") run an off-the-wall biased article arguing that Title IX should not be used to correct gender bias in education (except in athletics, where it's too late to take it back)?

John Tierney's tirade against the possible use of Title IX as a tool for correcting the most flagrant cases of bias against women in science education rests on these points:

1. Forcing men to share resources with women would "hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women" (presumably because of backlash).

2. Women aren't discriminated against in the sciences anyway. If they pursue some fields in smaller numbers than men, it's because they just don't like science (or maybe they aren't any good at it, or maybe they'd rather be stay-at-home moms so they can pursue their biological calling or maybe they just like low-paying jobs like secretary and grade school teacher that much more).

3. The reason they're not interested in the prestigious fields of physics and engineering is that, at a young age, they are "better rounded."

4. Giving women legal and institutional support in their bid for political, educational, and employment equality "infantilizes women."

Oh, and Tierney quotes Christina Hoff Sommers.

I bet Female Science Prof has something to say about this! Yep, she does.

APA Membership

I received a notice for renewing my APA membership in the mail. Yes, the U.S. mail. Every other organization I belong to sends an e-mail with a link for online renewal. And has been doing it that way for years. With the smaller organizations, I pay through PayPal. I mean, this is the era of people working at home, making wine bottle racks in the garage or sewing cloth diapers while the baby naps, and selling them online. Anyone can do it.

Anyone, but not philosophers. I renewed with the APA by return mail. I see now that it is possible to renew online. But not easy, and there's a bug. Do you remember your Member ID? And if you want to join for the first time, better go find a stamp.You do have some, don't you?

A proposed new game: timed trials at finding meaningful information on the APA website. It's like a scavenger hunt, but takes longer and ends in despair.

New blog and cfp: Evolution, Environment, Responsible Knowledge

Yes, yes, as soon as sabbatical is over, I will cut down on blog-reading (and novel-reading, and newspaper-reading, alas...), but in the meantime, what an interesting blog and cfp, yes? Yes:

Evolution, the Environment, and Responsible Knowledge

As Sharon Crasnow once wrote in a mighty good book review, truth-seeking and political endeavor are not mutually exclusive alternatives:

The investigation of power relations, the role of the political, social, and cultural in the search for truth and understanding, is one of feminist philosophy's key features, one that it shares with a number of other philosophical traditions, including pragmatism. That it is worth investigating how the political can hinder or aid our understanding of the world and our place
in it is a presupposition of feminist philosophy.

Certainly the politically informed endeavor to ascertain and value the truth is also a hallmark of environmental inquiry. I continue to ponder these dual roles as I prepare for the fall semester's teaching of, simultaneously, a logic class, a seminar on environmental and holistic philosophies, and a class on feminist philosophy.

Go check out the new blog!

How much fuel is that?

Judging fuel efficiency using MPG apparently leads most of us to misjudge the benefits of increasing fuel efficiency for the least efficient cars.

Miles per gallon tells us how many miles we can drive on one gallon of gas. But who has a sense of their gas usage?

What we do have a clear sense for--what we most clearly experience--is how many miles we drive. So the measurement that best matches how we intuitively measure our fuel use is how many gallons it takes to drive a certain number of miles (gallons per mile rather than miles per gallon).

The economists who conducted these experiments found that the MPG measurement is misleading because people don't realize that trading in a car that gets 18 mpg for one that gets 28 mpg is a bigger jump in fuel efficiency (twice as big!) than trading in one that gets 34 mpg for one that gets 50 mpg. The implication for policy is that increasing the fuel efficiency of behemoth gas guzzlers is more effective than incrementally tweaking hybrids.

This would be a great problem for a critical thinking course!

A collection of tidbits

Links from this week and last:

Via GonePublic, "Who is a public intellectual?" ponders whether the public intellectual is in decline in these anti-intellectual times. Answer: no, but don't count specialized New York Intellectuals. Do count generalists who make thoughtful problems interesting in history, politics, literature, and science. Barbara Ehrenreich, Garry Wills. I would add Bill McKibben--I don't think it's the academic or journalistic affiliation that makes someone a public intellectual but the type of problem and the level of interest they get for it.

History, science, literature: astronomers have used events in Homer's Odyssey to identify the date that Odysseus returned from the Trojan War--April 16, 1178 B.C. Their crucial assumption is that Homer knew what he was talking about when he mentioned celestial events--when Venus was on the rise, when constellations were setting. And surely he did--no "security" floodlights to block the view back then.

An article on neigborhoods, from my neighborhood. I taught Robert Putnam's article on social capital in my critical thinking class this year. Most people got the message that close communities raise quality of life. But a few students claimed that because they were "naturally" loners, they would not benefit from making social ties, in spite of Putnam's research findings that, for instance, people who get together with friends are less likely to die in the next year. These few students were also the ones who were struggling in the class, struggled to even get to class, weren't washing, and just plain weren't having fun. The story they were telling themselves about their exceptional natural inclination was not doing them any favors!

When males do it, it's biology...when females do it, it's "promiscuity."

I used to read books, but now I read reviews. I used to read novels, but now I read magazines. I used to read journal articles, but now I can get most of what I need to fill that buzzing need for intellectual stimulation online. And I'm not the only one (fair warning: a Nietzsche reference in this one).

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year...His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Sexy Girls and the Big Picture

Khadimir sends along this WaPo review of The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It. Here's a commercial showing a sexy sexy girl (looks to be all of 8 years old) who knows how to play the guys.

Really, I'm not sure why the Bratz/Barbie big-haired, lipstick-wearing, perfumed and ditzy girls are today's sexual ideal. In my circles, the sexy girls are the ones with tattoos, and the ones who ride Waterford road bikes, and the ones who can't get enough of counterpossibles and modal truths.

My problem is more about raising a non-sexist boy than it is holding off the sexualization of grade school girls. But the two are certainly related. And, according to another book I've been reading, Taking Back Childhood, both are related to the 1984 de-regulation of media that gave a pass to corporations to market any old thing to preschoolers. Really, is there any reason for The Lolita Effect other than it being a way to make a buck?

Ecology and History

Here's a New York Times article about new ideas in stream restoration. It does a great job of making presettlement environmental history seem at least a teensy-weensy bit sexy!

In the embedded video, Dorothy Merritts says that when we are considering the reasons for environmental problems, such as heavy silt loads deposited into the Cheasapeake Bay, "we can't just look around at modern land use and say 'We see agriculture—that's the problem. We see new suburbs—that's the problem.' Instead, go in and look at the history of that location."

Two good points here:
1. Land use history is not just interesting--it's an essential piece of knowledge to have in order to understand causes.
2. Over a billion dollars of private and public money is being spent on environmental restoration, but many projects are not based on evidence. The practice is advancing faster than the academic study of failures and successes.

How Well Does the APA Serve Our Needs?

Yikes. Spiros just about hits the nail on the head. I didn't think that the APA website could be any more poorly designed, difficult to navigate, or just plain ugly. I was wrong--here's a proposed new version.

The design is bad enough. The content makes me hang my head. How useful is it to anyone to post "data on the profession" that covers
— job placement from 1982-2002 (why does the data stop 5 years ago?),
— gender and race data just for 1991-1996 (over a decade ago!), and
— information on degrees awarded from 1949-1994 ??!!

Most of this data comes from free, public government sources and is available up through 2006. Heck, I've even posted some of it here and here.

Equal Pay for Equal Work

My Congressional Rep. again stands up for women and families. Louise Slaughter is a lead sponsor of the Paycheck Fairness Act which responds to last year's awful Ledbetter v. Goodyear decision with legislation that would help protect women against workplace discrimination.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 paid lip service to discrimination against women. It was passed because at the time women earned just 59¢ for every dollar that men earned. Now, 45 years later--hooray--women earn 77¢ for every dollar earned by men for the same work. An improvement of 18 cents!

And this figure just compares equal work. It doesn't begin to reflect how women are systematically kept out of high-paying, high-status jobs.

This is what Louise Slaughter said in a recent interview:

The Ledbetter case really shook us up. It was startling. None of us really thought that that would happen in this day and age. But Lilly Ledbetter's not alone. The Wage Project, a nonprofit group, estimates that women lose between $200,000 and $2 million in their lifetimes because of the wage gap.

Read the whole interview here.

W.V.O. Quine Video

Here is part of a 1977 video of W.V.O. Quine being interviewed by Brian Magee on BBC TV.



Magee introduces Quine as "a philosopher at the very summit of world reputation."

In this clip, Quine talks about how philosophy is on a continuum with science but is also different from it. He gives the examples of history and engineering as being at the most applied end of the sciences and philosophy and mathematics being at the most abstract end.

Magee asks Quine about the sorts of questions that philosophy takes up. Quine says that the question of how the world began is for physicists to deal with. The question of how life began is a question for biologists. And the question of why the world or life began is not a question at all, not even one for philosophers. It's merely a pseudo-question, because it doesn't have an answer.

Finally, Quine divides philosophy into two categories--ontology and epistemology. Philosophy deals with questions about what there is and questions about what we can know. On the subject of what there is, Quine says that objects are either material or mathematical.

Well, I'm an undisputed fan of Quine (see this website)--but doesn't this seem like a narrow view of philosophy?

Philosophical Partitions

I've been talking to a friend about the great divide in philosophy--between analytic and continental approaches. Although there are genuine differences in style, I'm convinced that the divide is politically maintained. Of course it is. Analytic philosophers of language (some of them) show more animosity toward continental philosophy of language than they do toward, say, analytic aesthetics, even though the difference between them is clearly greater in the latter case.

My friend pointed out that at the extremes (and perhaps that is the area of metaphysics in both cases?) they rival each other when it comes to elitism.

And how relevant to contemporary problems is the purest of either? The degree of triviality that is the apparent goal of the analytics is perfectly balanced by the degree of obscurity on the other side.

New Environmental Studies and Sciences organization

Who wants to strengthen research, teaching and service in the many Environmental Studies programs of North America?

Sure, we all do, but to help that effort along, consider checking out the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS). From their website:

The purpose of the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences (AESS) is to serve the faculty, students and staff of the 1000+ interdisciplinary "environmental" programs in North America and around the world. We seek to strengthen teaching, research and service in environmental studies and sciences, and to improve communication across boundaries that too often divide the traditional academic disciplines -- the physical, biological, and social sciences, and the humanities -- that need to be brought to bear in understanding and dealing with environmental problems and solutions. The association works to support the professional development of Association members not just as individuals but also to advance Environmental Studies and Sciences as a whole.

Since I got this email the same day that I read what a sad joke it is to attempt capping greenhouse gases, I joined the AESS immediately, in the hopes that the future might not resemble the past or, for that matter, the present.

Thanks to Dale Jamieson for forwarding this information to the International Society for Environmental Ethics.