Early-1981, following IBM’s withdrawal of support due to the organisation’s continued exclusion of women within its ranks, renowned astronomer Carl Sagan sent the following impassioned letter to each and every fellow member of The Explorers Club — an international society dedicated to scientific exploration since its inception in 1904 — and argued beautifully for a change of policy.

Later that year, The Explorers Club welcomed its first female members.

Carl Sagan’s letter:

Dear Fellow Member of The Explorers Club:

Thank you for the opportunity to write to you about the admission of women to The Explorers Club. The human zest for exploration and discovery is the hallmark of our species and one of the secrets of our success. It is a tradition that goes back much further than the 76 proud years in which The Explorers Club has been in existence. When our organization was formed in 1905, men were preventing women from voting and from pursuing many occupations for which they are clearly suited. In the popular mind, exploration was not what women did. Even so, women had played a significant but unheralded role in the history of exploration — in Africa in the Nineteenth Century, for example. Similarly, Lewis and Clark were covered with glory, but Sacajewea, who guided them every inch of the way, was strangely forgotten. All institutions reflect the prejudices and conventions of their times, and when it was founded The Explorers Club necessarily reflected the attitudes of 1905.

Traditions are important. They provide continuity with our past. But it is up to us to decide which traditions are essential to The Explorers Club and which are accidents of the epoch in which it was institutionalized. Times have changed since 1905. It is very clear that a foolish rigidity can destroy otherwise worthwhile institutions; they are then replaced by other organizations more in tune with the times. IBM’s recent withdrawal of corporate support for The Explorers Club because of our “exclusionary policy toward women” should be pondered carefully by every member. Many other former supporters may follow suit.

Today women are making extraordinary contributions in areas of fundamental interest to our organization. There are several women astronauts. The earliest footprints — 3.6 million years old — made by a member of the human family have been found in a volcanic ash flow in Tanzania by Mary Leakey. Trailblazing studies of the behavior of primates in the wild have been performed by dozens of young women, each spending years with a different primate species. Jane Goodall’s studies of the chimpanzee are the best known of the investigations which illuminate human origins. The undersea depth record is held by Sylvia Earle. The solar wind was first measured in situ by Marcia Neugebauer, using the Mariner 2 spacecraft. The first active volcanos beyond the Earth were discovered on the Jovian moon Io by Linda Morabito, using the Voyager 1 spacecraft. These examples of modern exploration and discovery could be multiplied a hundredfold. They are of true historical significance. If membership in The Explorers Club is restricted to men, the loss will be ours; we will only be depriving ourselves.

The supposed parallelism between our situation and those of other organizations seems to me strained. The Bohemian Club is a resort; The Explorers Club is not. The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts are for children. Their membership derives almost exclusively from adolescent and pre-adolescent youngsters, who have not yet fully accomodated to the opposite sex. But we presumably are adults, with a special responsibility for interacting with all humans on this planet.

I do not believe that the primary function of our organization is to promote male bonding or to serve as a social club — although there is certain room for both. I believe that the fundamental dedication of the club is that stated on the masthead of every issue of The Explorers Club Newsletter: “To the conquest of the unknown and the advancement of knowledge.” If this is our purpose, then admission should be open to all qualified members of the human species.

Cordially,

(Signed)

Carl Sagan

“Women of colour” beautifully illustrates the exact problem I discovered with feminism, as a woman who did not fit the mainstream criteria for being just a Woman. As a “woman of colour,” I am not just a Woman. I am a woman with a little something extra; there is a difference struck between women like me and white women. There is no Woman. There are no Women. There are two groups: women and “women of colour.” This tidily, and unfortunately, translates into the “us” and “them” categorization.

Because this distinction is made and has been proudly appropriated by “women of colour” without much criticism, this presumption that the white woman’s identity is a sort of “foundational” identity for all women is prevalent within feminism.

According to Loretta Ross, however, the term “women of color” was coined in 1977 among some black and other “minority” women in Washington, DC as “a solidarity definition, a commitment to work in collaboration with other oppressed women of color who have been ‘minoritized’.” Ross says, “Unfortunately, so many times, people of color hear the term ‘people of color’ from other white people that [PoCs} think white people created it instead of understanding that we self-named ourselves."

However, regardless of its history, Sana makes a salient point: the term "woman of colour" suggests "a woman with a little something extra", which implies that whiteness is the default.

I identify as a "woman of colour" in solidarity with other women who lack white privilege, but I have always been bothered that the term "people of colo[u]r” can be appropriated by white people to Other us and mark us as distinct from “people”. (I have tried using the term “racialized people”, but abandoned my efforts in popularizing the term, when a particular white anti-racist blogger responded by insisting that white people are racialized too.)

The underlying problem, of course, is that Othering is achieved by marking our race instead marking white people as “white”. Some people argue that the term “non-white people” centres on white people, and that the term “people of color” avoids this, but this logic betrays a misunderstanding of the language of Othering.

The famous first chapter of Edward Said’s Orientalism demonstrates that Oriental Studies, although a field intended to centre on the Orient and Orientals, actually reflects the cultural, colonial biases of European academics. White scholars might refer to us now as “Asian”, “Muslim”, “Chinese”, “Arab”, “West Asian”, “visible minority”, “African”, “racialized”, or “people of color”, but they are still in a position of power to speak on behalf of us, to define what we have in common with others in our group that make us a cohesive subject of study. White people explain us and our worldviews, while assuming that their presence and worldviews are normal and require no explanation.

When I first created this blog, I created the category White People Studies to be “reverse Orientalism”. White People Studies is about what all white people have in common, or at least about the defining characteristics of white people as a group that make them distinct. Some white readers objected to being called “white”, insisting that they are individuals and should not be grouped together with completely different individuals who happen to share the same race, begging me to think about how I would feel if the roles were reversed. Of course, these comments left by White People should be taken seriously as field data on how White People think, an invaluable addition to White People Studies.

In the end, the term “women of colour”, or any other term, will always be Othering unless we also call white women “white”. Instead of naming ourselves, we can continue naming, labelling, and discussing the Whites.

In other words, even when controlling for age, education, and generation, white Canadians earn more than non-white Canadians. Racial appearance causes the difference in earnings.

Wellesley Institute’s study, Canada’s Colour Coded Labour Market, was released in March 2011 and draws on data from the last mandatory long-form Census (which has been cancelled recently by the politically-conservative Harper government):

THE LAST AVAILABLE CENSUS DATA before the federal government cancelled the country’s mandatory long form Census reveals a troubling trend in Canada.

Despite years of unprecedented economic growth and an increasingly diverse population, this report confirms what so many Canadians have experienced in real life: a colour code is still at work in Canada’s labour market.

Racialized Canadians encounter a persistent colour code that blocks them from the best paying jobs our country has to offer.

[...]

Default explanations like “it takes a while for immigrants to integrate” don’t bear out. Even when you control for age and education, the data show first generation racialized Canadian men earn only 68.7% of what non-racialized first-generation Canadian men earn, indicating a colour code is firmly at play in the labour market. Here, the gender gap — at play throughout the spectrum — becomes disturbingly large: Racialized women immigrants earn only 48.7 cents for every dollar non-racialized male immigrants earn.

The colour code persists for second generation Canadians with similar education and age. The gap narrows, with racialized women making 56.5 cents per dollar non-racialized men earn; while racialized men earn 75.6 cents for every dollar non-racialized men in this cohort earn.

Further Reading:

• Skin colour matters in access to good jobs (Toronto Star)
• Canada’s Colour Coded Labour Market (PDF) by the Wellesley Institute

Related posts:

• Women of colour earn 53 cents for every white man’s dollar. by Restructure!
• Asians are not all rich. by Restructure!
• What’s in a Name? Your Job! by Sobia at Racialicious

The incident reminds many of us of the École Polytechnique Massacre. Both the University of Waterloo and l’École Polytechnique de Montréal focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Math, and Engineering) fields, and female students are a minority. Both schools are located in Canada. Both misogynists appear to be angry that women are attending university and are being educated in male-dominated fields.

The Marie-Curie-hating misogynist at Waterloo has also sent out a misogynist e-mail pretending to be the university’s president, and has created a Facebook page with similar misogynist rantings. The university’s Women’s Centre and LGBT student centre have closed due to safety concerns.

A male undergraduate at the University of Waterloo made this ridiculous—yet typical male-privileged—comment before taking down his post:

Yes, it is wrong, yes, it is inappropriate, but get a life if you are going to fuss and cry over stupid shit like this. Because if you do, you must be living in a sheltered bubble.

A commenter at hook & eye named bakka111 responds to this reaction:

The “Sheltered bubble” comment from Bill’s portfolio is particularly ironic. Just who lives in a sheltered bubble? Those who fear the messages because they have experienced the mundane-threats a patriarchal culture issues to women, or those who have never experienced such threats. Oh the irony.

Further Reading:

• The Fourteen Not Forgotten and Sexist Posters at Waterloo by Christine Cheng
• the honest truth: Marie Curie, in which one learns that double-Nobel-prize-winning Marie Curie received her education at an “underground university”, because conventional universities did not accept women. Imagine what the history of science would look like if women were not barred from university.

Striker Maribel Garcia reads a statement from women who went on a hunger strike in a tent encampment on the sidewalk in front of one of Versatronex' biggest customers, Digital Microwave Corporation.

On January 29, 1993, workers at the Versatronex plant in Sunnyvale, California, filed out of its doors for the last time. Seventeen years have passed since, but there are still electronics workers in Silicon Valley who remember the company’s name. It was the first Valley plant struck by production employees and the first where a strike won recognition of their union.

The struggle of these workers, almost all immigrants from Mexico, Central America and the Philippines, demolished some of the most cherished myths about the Silicon Valley workforce. It showed workers there are like workers everywhere. Under the right circumstances, even in the citadel of high tech’s open shop, people are willing to organize for a better life.

[...]

While living standards rise for a privileged elite at the top of the workforce, they’ve dropped for thousands of workers on the production line. Tens of thousands of workers have been dropped off the lines entirely, as production was moved out of the Valley to other states and countries. Companies long ago eliminated their no-layoff pledge. Permanent jobs became temporary and then disappeared entirely. The image of the clean industry was undermined by toxic contamination of the Valley’s water supply and a high occurrence of chemically induced industrial illness.

[...]

Another co-inventor of the transistor, William Shockley, won renown as a partisan of theories of the racial inferiority of African-Americans. As Shockley, Noyce, and others guided the development of the industry in Silicon Valley, they instituted policies that effectively segregated its workforce. In electronics plants, women were the overwhelming majority, while the engineering and management staff consisted overwhelmingly of men. Immigrants from Asian and Latin American countries were drawn to the Valley’s production lines. Engineering and management jobs went to white employees.

By the mid-1990s, Asian workers made up 30 percent of the skilled production workforce, 47 percent of the semiskilled workforce and 41 percent of the unskilled workforce. Latinos constituted 18 percent of skilled workers, 21 percent of semiskilled workers and 36 percent of unskilled workers. Both groups together were only 17 percent of management employees and 25 percent of professional and engineering employees. The same picture held true for women. While 23 percent of management employees were women and 29 percent of professionals, women were 80 percent of clerical employees, 40 percent of skilled workers, 60 percent of semiskilled workers and 50 percent of unskilled workers. The picture painted by these statistics is still largely accurate today.

African-American workers were frozen out almost entirely. Although unemployment in the African-American communities of Oakland and East Palo Alto, within easy commuting distance of the plants, has remained at depression levels, African-Americans are not above 7.5 percent of the workforce in any category and below 3 percent in management and engineering.

Karen Hossfeld, a sociologist at San Francisco State University, who has written extensively on the status of women in high-tech industry, explains the segregation as a conscious decision on the part of manufacturers. “Employers assume foreign-born women will be unlikely to agitate for pay hikes,” she says.

(Via Racialicious)

Jessica Yee: “Introduction”

[W]e’re not really equal when we’re STILL supposed to uncritically and obediently cheer when white women are praised for winning “women’s rights,” and to painfully forget the Indigenous women and women of colour who were hurt in that same process. We are not equal when in the name of “feminism” so-called “women’s only” spaces are created and get to police and regulate who is and isn’t a woman based on their interpretation of your body parts and gender presentation, and not your own. We are not equal when initatives to support gender equality have reverted yet again to “saving” people and making decisions for them, rather than supporting their right to self-determination, whether it’s engaging in sex work or wearing a niqab. So when feminism itself has become it’s own form of oppression, what do we have to say about it?

Louis Esme Cruz: “Medicine Bundle of Contradictions: Female-man, Mi’kmaq/Acadian/Irish Diasporas, Invisible disAbilities, masculine-Feminist”

Two-Spirit people are not allowed to participate in societies as our full selves and then we are shamed and blamed for the ways we are hurt by this. When people say that a space is “women-only” they are assuming that women are always sensitive to each other’s needs, are always able to understand each other’s experiences, these experiences are always the same, and women are not violent. Explicitly, this says all women are safe; all men are unsafe. The inclusion of Two-Spirit people in women only space is arbitrary, shifting with who has the power to define the space. This person in power is rarely Native. From what I have seen, women who parade feminist ideals are the ones who decide who experiences gender-oppression. Two-Spirit people can talk about our oppression only when it parallels women’s experiences. When our lives get too complicated we are judged, ignored, punished, humiliated. Whether it’s women-only or men-only space, the naming of a space as only one gender encourages invasion and conquest because they don’t allow people to be the complex creatures we are. This pushes Two-Spirit people to the margins simply because we are not one thing or another. We need liberation from the confines of gender baggage, too. This parallels the larger call from Indigenous sovereignty movements asking for our Native Nations to be seen as distinct, sovereign entities. We are necessarily unique and complex for a reason.

Andrea Plaid: ” ‘No, I Would Follow the Porn Star’s Advice’: A Case Study in Educational Privilege and Kyriarchy”

I could have easily benefited from the feminist-academic complex. I concentrated on women’s studies as part of my liberal-arts degree and my Independent Study project when I was getting my master’s degree in library science – since writing a master’s thesis was not an option at the time – was on founding and operating a sex-positive library, though I did not specifically study sex as an undergraduate or graduate student. The fact that I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree allows me to be taken slightly more seriously because they signal that I know certain “privilege codes and signals” gotten from about seven years of beyond high school education, like knowing about or having “the right” books on my bookshelf or in my e-reader (Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, anything and just about everything by bell hooks, some Barbara Ehrenreich and Naomi Klein, etc.), having seen or heard about the “right” movies (anything Pedro Almodovar and Mira Nair, Outfoxed, Matrix, etc.) and the “right” music (usually some form of “alternative” hip-hop, rock, and country). It also means I know the “right” places to meet other like-minded educated people offline (coffee shops, poetry readings, film screenings, panel discussions, galleries and museums, and so on.) In other words, my stating that I’m degreed lets others know that I’m the kind of “culturedness” that only a bachelor’s and master’s degree “can give” (translation: “can pay for” – which, really, is what educational privilege is welded with and signals)…and if I wasn’t exposed to these things, I can damn sure learn it quickly because I know the “right” places to go find such things, including the “right” Internet sources and from those adjunct and tenured types.

The linchpin in all of this and what I’m signaling to others by my degrees is that I’m capable of talking about complex ideas and issues, like the various schools of feminism, because I’m trained to do it, based on the “virtue” of the “right” knowledge and furthermore, take my complex notions to “the masses” who need to hear it and embrace it as part of their lives. (This notion is one of the rawest forms of educational privilege.) Because that, from what we’re told in these social-class incubators called four-year colleges and advanced degrees, is the great responsibility that comes from the great advantage – and promise – of being an “educated person.” The more subtle lesson passed to us in college is The Degreed are the only ones worth listening to – the more degreed, the more you’re worth listening to, because you’re an “expert” due to all those years of studying.

Several recent studies have suggested that the gender gap in STEM fields is caused not by bias, but simply by different choices made by men and women. What the new research shows, Dasgupta said, is choice isn’t as simple as people think. “People assume that these choices are free choices, based on talent and interest and motivation,” Dasgupta said. “But these data suggest that the meaning of choices, of what it means to choose math or science, is more complicated. Even talented people may not choose math or science not because they don’t like it or are not good at it, but because they feel that they don’t belong.”

—Inoculation Against Stereotype by Scott Jaschik (Inside Higher Ed)

There is a common belief among some computer geek communities that women are underrepresented in STEM because we just don’t like it, and so we should celebrate differences instead of making women “miserable” by “forcing” us into careers we “don’t like”. This study would debunk that myth, if only most men in tech who discuss the topic of women in tech actually did some research on it, instead of leaving comments that make male geeks feel good about themselves and rationalize the gender imbalance in “their” field.

For other male geeks who insist that there are hard-wired brain differences in men and women, and argue that women’s brains are hard-wired against understanding math and science as well as men (instead of hard-wired against enjoying math and science), this part of the article should be emphasized:

Skeptics might wonder if some of the [gender] differences [in engagement] among students relate to how well the students know the material. The researchers checked for that and found that, across sections, women outperformed men on grades. So the data point to women losing confidence with male instructors — even if female students know the material as well as or better than their male counterparts.

Link: Inoculation Against Stereotype (Inside Higher Ed)

Gender Differences and Casual Sex: The New Research:

[M]ost of the gender difference in women’s and men’s propensity to agree to a broad-daylight, out-of-nowhere proposition for casual sex is driven by women’s perception that their risks are higher, and their likely enjoyment is lower from the proposer.

In the actual paper, Conley (2011) concludes:

First, male sexual proposers (who approached women) are uniformly seen as less desirable than female sexual proposers (who approached men). Therefore, gender differences in the original Clark and Hatfield study are due more to the gender of the proposer than to the gender of the study participants. Moreover, the idea that these gender differences reflect broad, evolved differences in women’s and men’s mating strategies was not supported. Across studies involving both actual and hypothetical sexual encounters, the only consistently significant predictor of acceptance of the sexual proposal, both for women and for men, was the perception that the proposer is sexually capable (i.e., would be “good in bed”). The perceptions of sexual capabilities also mediated the relationship between gender and acceptance of casual sex offers. Finally, indirect evidence suggests that perceptions of risk may play a role in gender differences in casual sex attitudes.

Jill of Feministe writes:

Quit using that study where strangers walked up to people on college campuses and offered sex as “proof” that men desire sex more than women. Perhaps consider that women may want sex just as much, but have spent their entire lives hearing about how sex with strangers is a terrible, dangerous idea, leading to the (probably correct) understanding that the only kind of men who would approach you in broad daylight offering sex are men who are either serial killers or sex offenders or at least total fucking creeps?

There is also an insightful criticism of the study by Jenn:

What I hypothesize is that participants (with the probable exception of women propositioned by women) likely assume that “go to bed”, in this case, implies penetrative sex, simply because this kind of activity is considered a priori the default definition of sex whereas all others may or may not be considered “sex” as such, and many are considered mere foreplay.

I think the results would differ greatly if the propositions included the exact nature of the encounter in question. What I mean is that penetrative sex, for women with male partners and receiving men with male partners, is both risky (higher likelihood of STDs, and in the former, pregnancy) and less likely to result in mutual satisfaction in partners unsuited to the others whims. Penetrative sex can be performed between men or a man and a woman with the receptive partner remaining completely unmoved and unsatisfied (or even harmed) while the penetrative partner has a much higher likelihood of finding sexual satisfaction. This is because penetrative sex is centered around the performance and enjoyment of the penetrating partner — sex begins when their arousal is sufficient to perform penetration and ceases when their arousal is satisfied by orgasm. The initiation and completion of this kind of sexual act does not depend upon the enjoyment of the receiving partner, and wholly on the state of the penetrating partner.

Of course, I do agree that there are social perceptions of the performance of men and women that differ greatly, but what I am saying is thus: men are almost always more likely to be evaluated in terms of their sexual dominance, i.e. their ability to pleasure someone else. Whereas, with the probable exception of homosexual encounters, women are almost always more likely to be evaluated in terms of their sexual passivity, i.e. their ability to be receptive and passive to the sexual whims of a penetrating partner who is much more likely to be satisfied by the default sexual encounter and faces much less risk.

I’m not arguing that the rape culture and the stigma against women who engage in casual sex doesn’t have any effect on the results. What I am saying is that I think a huge factor in this study is the social perception of what constitutes sex, and how incredibly centered it is on the penis and the enjoyment of the penetrating partner, to the wholesale exclusion of the status, enjoyment, and agency of the non-penetrative partner. In short, penetrative partners are evaluating whether or not they could be sufficiently aroused by a random partner to have a pleasing experience, where receiving partners are evaluating whether they will wind up with an STD, pregnant, in pain, or achieve any sort of satisfaction at all.

(The post title is inspired by the one at Feminist Philosophers: Women uninterested in casual sex with those they consider likely to be dangerous and bad in bed.)

Link: Gender Differences and Casual Sex: The New Research

But not everyone buys that script. Mona Charen, a conservative columnist for the National Review, challenges that view with this question: If more white Americans feel like an embattled minority, why did they elect President Barack Obama?

“Did they become racist after electing the first black president?” she asks.

Charen says the United States today is “incredibly tolerant and open.”

White Americans did not elect Obama. Most White Americans (55%) voted for McCain. Obama was elected by most Americans of color and a minority (43%) of White Americans.

Yes, the numbers can and do work like that.

Lopez writes:

Seriously, if you didn’t know the back-story — you didn’t know the trainwreck that Charlie Sheen’s life has become, and the history of drug use and decadence — wouldn’t Sheen’s recent quotes be impressive?

Let’s say you were an employer, looking to add to your sales staff? Wanna play? Here are some typical job interview questions and REAL Charlie Sheen answers.

Admit it, you’d hire the guy if you didn’t know any better:

What is your greatest strength?

“I’m bi-winning. I win here. I win there.”

Describe a typical work week.

”I’m proud of what I created. It was radical. I exposed people to magic. I exposed them to something they’re never going to see in their boring normal lives.”

How many hours do you normally work?

“Sometimes sleep is for infants. I don’t sleep. I wait. When I can’t sleep I don’t fight it. I just figure that there’s a higher calling.”

What is your greatest weakness?

“I am on a drug. It’s called ‘Charlie Sheen!’ It’s not available because if you try it once you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.”

[...]

What are your salary expectations?

“I’m not [broke] but I was kind of counting on some of that money to get me through the summer. Now I’ve got to like work. But that’s alright. Work’s good. Work fuels the soul.”

[...]

What do people most often criticize about you?

“You borrow my brain for five seconds and just be like dude, can’t handle it, unplug this bastard. It fires in a way that is, I don’t know, maybe not from this terrestrial realm.

Seriously, there is something very wrong with a culture in which programmers’ outrageous self-descriptions are taken at face value.

Men tend to over-estimate their abilities and self-promote more than women when it comes to math and coding ability. Instead of hiring programmers who act like Charlie Sheen, recruiters and interviewers should take imposter syndrome into account.

This is understandable. Chinese writing, especially Traditional Chinese, is very visually complex. Chinese characters are logograms, which makes learning how to read Chinese difficult.

However, there is a difference between finding Chinese writing confusing and alleging that Chinese people are confused.

According to Wikipedia:

Popular in the United States during the 1960s,^[1][2] a Chinese fire drill is a gag performed by a vehicle’s occupants when stopped at a traffic light, especially when there is a need to change drivers or procure something from the trunk: Before the light changes to green, each occupant gets out, runs around the vehicle, and gets back inside (but not necessarily in his original seat). If one of the participants lags, the others may drive off without him.

Figuratively, a Chinese fire drill is an act—especially, any large, ineffective, and chaotic exercise—by a group of individuals that accomplishes nothing.

[...]

Around the time of World War I, British English’s adjective Chinese had a slang meaning of “confused, disorganized, or difficult to understand.” Other examples include:

• “Chinese puzzle,” a puzzle with no or a hard-to-fathom solution^[1]
• “Chinese whispers,” also known as “Telephone,” a children’s game in which a straightforward statement is shared through a line of players one player at a time until it reaches the end, often having been comically transformed along the way into a completely different statement.
• “Chinese auction,” a “penny social”
• “Chinese national anthem,” an explosion
• “Chinese landing,” a clumsy landing
• “Chinese cigarette,” a bent, smashed, or slightly torn cigarette.
• “Chinese ace,” an inept pilot, derived from the term One Wing Low (which sounds like a Chinese name), an aeronautical technique^[1][2]

It appears that when you are Othering, associative thinking can lead you to project your own state on to the Other. For example, if you are often confused by Chinese, then you may stereotype Chinese (language, people, culture) as having the typical characteristic of being confused. If you are confused by mixed-raced people, you might stereotype mixed-raced people as being confused.

This would be a reflection of yourself, not a property of the Other.

Related posts:

• The Orientalist Riff is an example of white culture and tradition. by Restructure!
• White American culture is General Tso’s Chicken and Chop Suey. by Restructure!
• “Chinese food” in the U.S. is not foreign, but foreignness is not “authenticity”. by Restructure!

The yellow sticky note says, “My mom has a PhD in math”.

I am not a mother, but if I reproduced, I would be.

The job ad is also based on the same stereotype of female technical ineptitude as “So simple, your mother could do it”.

Original photo by Jessie Bennett (via Sociological Images and Geek Feminism Blog)

There is sexism in tech culture. However, I continue to love tech, because I think of the sexism as a separate, unnecessary appendage to pure tech. I cannot think of sexism as intrinsic to or inevitable in tech, because then I would be either self-hating, or I would have to give up my love for technology. Maybe my personal ontology is compartmentalized thinking in order to survive as a woman in tech, but I think it’s also true.

Some people argue that for tech to “attract” women, the culture needs to be broadened to include humanistic aspects. However, this proposal may derive from the implicit sexist assumption that men really are better at tech, and women really are better at the humanities.

Actually, what I hate most about tech news sites is that when I go there for technology news, there are off-topic comments about love and relationships. It’s typically men discussing being single; having trouble with women; being Nice Guys^TM; giving advice about what women really want; talking about how women have it easier; bragging about how even their grandmother/mother/wife can use technology X; and other sexist generalizations about women. In other words, the idea that pure tech scares away women, that tech culture is currently free of human influence, is a product of male privilege and the inability to recognize that the state of being male is not the state of being neutral.

By pointing this out, of course, I too am talking about social issues surrounding tech instead of pure tech. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s just that I think of technology as fun, and I don’t want to be reminded about how I am oppressed 100% of the time, or whenever I try to immerse myself in geekery to escape from life’s troubles. I wish there was a general tech news site that is just about tech, not tech bundled with sexism. Hacker News is not this. Ars Technica is not this. Reddit subreddits are not this. Slashdot is not this. Digg is not this.

More women than men discuss sexism, and it is not because we find the topic more fun, entertaining, or enjoyable than men. It is because sexism gets in the way of our freedom. I blog about sexism in geek culture not because it’s my passion, but because it gets in the way of my passions. My struggle against my marginalization is not my hobby.

A Muslim airport worker has accused airline Cathay Pacific of racism after he was refused a job interview – only to be offered one when he applied two days later using a fake white British-sounding name.

Algerian-born Salim Zakhrouf applied to Cathay Pacific for a job as a passenger services officer at Heathrow Airport.

Mr Zakhrouf, 38, who has lived in Britain since 1991 and is a UK citizen, was told by email he had not been selected for interview.

But applying 48 hours later as ‘Ian Woodhouse’ with an identical CV and home address, he was invited for an interview by the same personnel officer who had first refused him.

via Resist racism, who points out, “For clarity:  My name is not the problem, as others have suggested.  Racism is the problem.”.

Related links:

• British employers racially discriminate against job applicants with African and Asian names. by Restructure!
• Call for anonymous CVs to stop job interview sexism and racism (The Guardian)
• Masking the gender and race of job applicants increases diversity in hiring. by Restructure!
• Discrimination against resumes with Chinese, Indian, and Pakistani names in Canada
• Discrimination against resumes with black-sounding names in the United States
• Discrimination against resumes with Chinese, Middle Eastern, and indigenous names in Australia

Swiftly and graciously accepting rejection is a cornerstone of radical consent. It hurts, but if you really believe in sexual autonomy, you just have to suck it up — without pleading or wheedling or demanding answers. You need a reason to be with someone, not to reject them.

Link: On rejection by gauche

Related post:

• The ethical corollary of “sex is a basic human need” is that rape is justified. by Restructure!

Some men argue that when women “withhold sex” from men, we are depriving men of their basic needs:

A sense of entitlement? That’s what you want to call the basic human need for love, companionship, approval, and sex? [...] And then you wonder why guys perceive hostility from women. Gee, I wonder.

— unapproved comment from a Geek Feminism post

If a woman declines to have sex with a man, is she violating the man’s human rights, his alleged “right to sex”, or is the man’s experience of being deprived of his rights actually evidence of his sense of “entitlement” over women’s bodies?

This visual representation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs puts “sex” at the bottom base of the pyramid (falling under the category “Physiological” needs, which are the most basic needs), but “sexual intimacy” is also at the third rung from the bottom, falling under the category of “Love/belonging” needs. “Security of body” is at the at the second rung from the bottom of the pyramid, falling under the category of “Safety” needs, which is above “Physiological” needs but below “Love/belonging” needs.

If the “right to be not raped” falls under “Safety” and “security of body”, then is the alleged “right” to obtain sex a more basic need than the “right to be not raped”? Or does “Safety”/”security of body”/the “right to be not raped” have higher priority than fulfilling everyone’s alleged “need” for sex?

Of course, if one assumes that sex is a more basic need than security of body, then the ethical corollary would be that rape is justified. If you accept “rape is wrong” as an axiom, then you should agree that a person’s security of body/the right to be not raped has a higher priority than a person’s “need” for sex.

Men who lack basic empathy for women (in same the way that white people lack empathy for brown people and rich people lack empathy for poor people) might imagine that a world where everyone who wants sex receives it is a better world than one in which sexual consent is required. They might even invoke a Fallacious Flip, arguing that they would not mind if the gender roles were reversed, and that they wouldn’t mind being raped.

What is wrong with this argument—besides heterosexual men’s tendency to incorrectly visualize the thought experiment as the heterosexual-male-fantasy trope where the man is chased by only the women who look like models—is that they fail to take into account the power imbalance between men and women. A better analogy would be imagining whether the need for security of body or the “need” for sex has a higher priority within a male prison, where men have a high chance of being raped. If you are a man and you do not understand why the claim that sex is a basic need is rapist logic, then imagine being in a male prison where about half the prison population is larger and stronger than you, and where rape is a real threat. Imagine that when you resist the sexual advances of an inmate who is larger and stronger than you, the inmate asserts that sex is a basic need, accuses you of violating his human rights, claims that you have social power over him because you reject him, and states that you are being hostile.

Statistically, men have the power to deny women sex through physical force, which is why a world where everyone has the ability to rape everyone else would benefit men. Unfortunately, this “hypothetical” world is hardly a thought experiment; it is very much the reality we are living in. Women are much more likely to be raped than men, despite the requirement of sexual consent being encoded into law. Thus, when men assert that sex is a basic need, they are not making some philosophical, abstract, or theoretical argument about what counts as a “basic human need”. They are advancing the status quo of rape culture in a society where men rape women because they do not prioritize consent.

Sex is not a basic need. Unlike breathing, food, and water, having sex with another person is not necessary for survival. Asexual people exist, live full lives, and are complete human beings. To argue that sex is a basic need is indeed a display of both entitlement and privilege. Women are not being hostile towards men when we complain about men feeling “entitled” to sex. Men are being hostile and threatening to women when they make elaborate arguments about why their libido is more important than our security of body.

Related posts:

• My Point, Here It Is by Melissa McEwan at Shakesville
• On rejection and power by gauche at flagging opinicus rampant
• “Creepy” means something different for men and women. by Restructure! at Geek Feminism Blog

When I was a child, Black history month consisted of the traditional lecture on Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad, because heaven forbid we actually admit that as an English colony, Canada had slavery [too].  Many Canadians grow to adulthood and never realize this historical truth.  Because the underground railroad has become such a fixation, it has allowed many to have the false belief, that unlike our American cousins, that we were far to civilized to engage in this great crime against humanity. Instead, we will focus on the fact that Harriet Tubman’s church still stands in St. Catherine’s.  We don’t want to talk about the fact that White Supremacist Canada was hardly welcoming to escaped slaves, or that our Prime Minsters were not fans of people of colour.  Instead, we will wag our fingers and scowl about American founding fathers owning slaves.

Not only do many falsely believe that slavery did not happen in Canada, far too many are unaware that Jim Crow laws existed here as well.  In 1946, Viola Desmond was arrested for daring to sit in the White section of a movie house.  She was dragged out of the theater by two men, injuring her knee in the process.  To further shame Desmond, after her arrest, she was held in a male cell block.  Eventually, she was charged with tax evasion because of the difference in price between White seats and Blacks seats.  It was a difference of one cent.  With the help of the NSACCP (The Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People), Desmond would take her fight to the supreme court of Nova Scotia.  Desmond was a trailblazer and instead of being recognized as such, the Canadian government recently sought to pardon her, as though her arrest was actually a stain on her life, instead of the government itself.

Growing up and attending Canadian schools, I never learned a single word about Desmond and I believe that this was to continue the indoctrination that Canada is a tolerant, racially just society.  I did not learn about the porters strike.  I most certainly did not learn about the destruction of Africville.  As a child, it forced me to look southward to find examples of people of the African diaspora to function as role models, rather than in my own country.  I would continue to live in ignorance, had I not made a great effort to look beyond the lack of education I had been given in schools.

Read the whole thing.

Link: Why I am Skipping Black History Month

How do people pay for shit twice in the hood. Poverty is lucrative. People who own businesses in the hood make money charging incredible prices for the day to day things needed to survive.

The first example that comes to mind is a New York times article where Barbara Ehrenreich talks about the “ghetto tax” and how being poor is expensive. She writes,

• “Poor people are less likely to have bank accounts..”
• .”..low-income car buyers…pay more for car loans than more affluent buyers.”
• “Low-income drivers pay more for car insurance.”
• “They are more likely to buy their furniture and appliances through pricey rent-to-own businesses.”
• “They are less likely to have access to large supermarkets and hence to rely on the far more expensive…convenient stores.”

When you add that all up, you really get a sense of how when you live in the hood you pay more for services and products, just because you live in the hood.

The example of how poverty is expensive is Rafi and Dallas’ video Check Mate. Checkmate analyzes why people in the hood use check cashing places rather than banks, why there are arguably no banks in the hood and how check cashing spots,  pawn shops and gold chain shops operate to seperate the people who don’t have a lot of money from the little bit of bread that they do have.

In Spending, Priorities, and Class Divides, s.e. smith of this ain’t livin’ writes:

Financial planning seems like a quaint luxury to a lot of people because, functionally, it is. It should not be, but it is, and refusing to talk about this fact means that conversations about money, concentration of wealth, fighting your way to get ahead in this culture, end up fundamentally skirting over a pretty critical issue. If you start a financial planning discussion with the ground assumption that everyone has money to spare and can trim the budget to make more, you’re pretty much telling a big chunk of your readership to just not even bother.

In Are You Better Off Buying $200 Shoes?, Gwen Sharp of Sociological Images writes:

Further, advice such as that given here present this as simply a matter of being economically smart, rather than as a class issue: unless you’re looking for the type of trendy shoes that you’ll only want to wear briefly anyway, you shouldn’t waste your time at H&M.  Similarly, in grad school I was once told I was “dumb” to rent rather than buy a house, in a town where they cost $150,000+. In both cases, the opportunities provided by economic advantage are perceived as economic common sense, obvious choices for anyone who is smart and has decent taste. Combined with the invisibility of people who can’t afford to spend that much money, accepting these class assumptions allows us to gaze disdainfully at people in “cheap” shoes, confident that they, too, are simply “cheap.”

From Microaggressions:

• Upper-class activist:: Why don’t you have a cell phone? That’s ridiculous!
• Me:: I come from a poor family.
• Upper-class activist:: I guess some people just choose to spend their resources differently.
• Me:: No, I can’t afford one.
• Upper-class activist:: You just don’t spend your money well enough.

Myth 1: From the time they start school, most girls are less interested in science than boys are.

Reality: In elementary school about as many girls as boys have positive attitudes toward science. A recent study of fourth graders showed that 66 percent of girls and 68 percent of boys reported liking science. But something else starts happening in elementary school. By second grade, when students (both boys and girls) are asked to draw a scientist, most portray a white male in a lab coat. Any woman scientist they draw looks severe and not very happy. The persistence of the stereotypes start to turn girls off, and by eighth grade, boys are twice as interested in STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) careers as girls are. The female attrition continues throughout high school, college and even the work force. Women with STEM higher education degrees are twice as likely to leave a scientific or engineering job as men with comparable STEM degrees.

[...]

Myth 3: Science and math teachers are no longer biased toward their male students.

Reality: In fact, biases are persistent, and teachers often interact more with boys than with girls in science and math. A teacher will often help a boy do an experiment by explaining how to do it, while when a girl asks for assistance the teacher will often simply do the experiment, leaving the girl to watch rather than do. Research shows that when teachers are deliberate about taking steps to involve the female students, everyone winds up benefiting. This may mean making sure everyone in the class is called on over the course of a particular lesson, or asking a question and waiting 10 seconds before calling on anyone. Good math and science teachers also recognize that when instruction is inquiry-based and hands-on, and students engage in problem solving as cooperative teams, both boys and girls are motivated to pursue STEM activities, education and careers.

Related post:

• Scientists are “normal” people, children discover by Restructure!

There are days when I simply cannot bear the entire field of evolutionary psychology: it’s so deeply tainted with bad research and a lack of rigor. And that makes me uncomfortable, because the fundamental premise, that our behaviors are a product of our history, is self-evidently true. It’s just that researchers in this field couple an acceptance of that premise to a deep assumption of adaptive teleology, the very thing that they should be evaluating, and produce some of the most awesomely trivial drivel.

I’ve just finished reading an article titled “Darwin’s Rape Whistle: Have women evolved to protect themselves from sexual assault?“, and it’s everything I despise about evolutionary psychology. It’s nothing but sloppy thinking and poor science propped up by a conviction that plausibility is sufficient support for certainty.

[...]

Another way to look at it is that they are hypothesizing that women are more likely to behave in ways that invite physical attack and brutal abuse when they aren’t ovulating. That is a remarkable assertion. It also carries the strange implication that the consequences of rape can be measured by the likelihood of immediate fertilization, rather than by the toll of physical injury and emotional trauma, a peculiar thing for psychologists to neglect. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a general hypothesis that people, men and women, who can avoid violence at any time in their life, are more likely to be reproductively successful and thereby pass on their genes to subsequent generations? That’s all they’re saying, essentially, and the straining to sex it up by tying globally useful behaviors to reproductive cycles is unconvincing.

In Evolutionary psychology for the masses, Jerry Coyne writes:

Now I don’t oppose evolutionary psychology on principle. The evolutionary source of our behavior is a fascinating topic, and I’m convinced that the genetic influences are far stronger than, say, posited by anti-determinists like Dick Lewontin, Steve Rose, and Steve Gould.  Evolved adaptations are particularly likely to be found in sexual behavior, which is intimately connected with the real object of selection: the currency of reproduction.  I’m far closer in my views on this topic to Steve Pinker than to Steve Gould.  And there are many good studies in the field, so I don’t mean to tar the whole endeavor.

But, for crying out loud, let’s have the journalists and scientists show a little more responsibility when reporting on evolutionary psychology.  If there are problems with a study, describe them.  If an idea is pure speculation, say it.  If there are other explanations for a phenomenon, give them.  Let’s not gull the public into claiming that we understand something with near certainty when we don’t.   These lax reportorial standards, pervasive in evolutionary psychology, seem to be much tighter in other areas of science, like physics or molecular biology.  And this despite the enormous difficulty of demonstrating that any human behavior is an evolved adaptation.

Every time I write a piece like this, one that’s critical of evolutionary psychology, I get emails from its practitioners, chewing me out for being so hard on their field.  And my response is always the same: I’ll stop being so hard on your field when you guys start being more critical yourselves.  If you policed your own discipline better, I wouldn’t have to.

Of course, not only practising scientists see the poor logic of many evolutionary psychology arguments. Members of the general public can generally detect the logical fallacy formally known as affirming the consequent.