The Joy of Sexism

This week, I've been embroiled in not one but two gender-based debates.

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.

Quite a line-up. Clearly they decided to look at the very best, most illustrious and most respected science blogs... and also Neuroskeptic. Anyway, unfortunately I can't access the paper, despite being in it, but according to the abstract they found that:

Online science informational content is male dominated in that far more men than women are present... we found that these women are:

• 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’.

Without knowing the details it's hard to evaluate these claims, but it's fair to say that some of it rings true.

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.