What Would Simone de Beauvoir Say? Bringing Up Bébé by former Wall Street Journal reporter Pamela Druckerman is the latest addition to books that highlight our cultural obsession with motherhood, or the failings of American mothers.  Even if you haven’t read the memoir you probably know the gist of the story given the raft of media coverage: after some time spent living in France where she gave birth to two children, Druckerman concludes that French women are superior mothers because they have time for themselves and their children are better behaved compared with her American counterparts.

Plenty of critics have taken aim at Druckerman’s argument but few have spent much time discussing the differences between French (read “extensive and nationalized”) and and American (read “few and individualized”) social supports for mothers and families aside from a quick mention before they move on to tackle other aspects of her narrative.

Surely it’s not so easy to dismiss these massive differences and the social conditions they create for mothers in their respective countries.  As a feminist, I want to focus on these structural problems and solutions, not toss them into a “by the way” paragraph.  I agree with my fellow GWPenner, Deborah Siegel, who argues here that we still need to demand some form of national childcare and better work-life options.

Work v. Motherhood Again New research in Gender and Society finds that most moms would work even if they didn’t have to.  According to Karen Christopher’s findings, mothers said they found more fulfillment in paid work than in parenting, and most women (regardless of class, race/ethnicity, or marital status), said they would work even if they didn’t have to.

Mother-readers, does this ring true to you?  Don’t get me wrong: I love my work at the National Women’s Studies Association.  At the same time, I don’t want to have to rank-order work over my role as a mother.  To me this sounds like an either/or choice that we should refuse.

Feminist Ryan Gosling Okay, this isn’t about motherhood, but Feminist Ryan Gosling falls squarely into the “and Feminism” portion of my roundup.  I love Danielle Henderson’s take on “feminist flash cards.”  I also love that Danielle is a graduate student in Gender and Women’s Studies.  I think you’ll love her work and her sense of humor, too!  Check it out and then post a comment here.

KYLA: We are having the wrong conversation(s). This is the conclusion I came to after attending an amazing community dialogue on Gender Identity Disorder (GID) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).  Part of the NYC Quorum Forum, the dialogue explored how language is used in ongoing debates around GID to “distance gender expression/experiences from other experiences currently described in the DSM.”

This was far from the first time I’ve thought about the DSM within my work on transgender legal protections.  Indeed, when discussing various legal strategies for employment discrimination recourse, I often bring up the article written by Levi and Klein in Transgender Rights on using disability law to protect transgender workers.  I have also done a lot of reading on the pathologization and stigmatization caused by a diagnosis of GID and engaged in conversations on the removal of this diagnosis or its transference to a medical rather than psychiatric diagnosis.  And I’ve chewed on Andrew Sharpe’s point about how the GID excludes members of the transgender and gender non-conforming population whose identities do not fit into the narrow narrative the DSM has established as the “right” narrative for accessing treatment and care.

Despite all of this, my brain never quite connected these two conversations – the pathologization of DSM diagnoses and the connections between transgender and disability rights.  But thanks to the folks who gathered in Bluestockings for this dialogue and demanded more from our community/movement/whatever you want to call it, my brain is working in new directions now.  And these directions feel darn exciting.

As much as I appreciate the advocacy people are conducting around the upcoming revision of the DSM, I don’t believe talking about a removal of GID is the right conversation at this time.  The fact is access to health care and coverage often hinges on a diagnosis.  DSM diagnoses are also used in courts to prove the legitimacy of a transgender plaintiff who is bringing forward a discrimination claim.  Now, do I think either of these things are right?  NO!  But these are currently the structures we are operating under.

Now, let’s definitely talk about changing the way our legal system works and expanding its overly narrow definitions of who fits into protected categories and who isn’t deserving of protection.  And let’s definitely continue the fight for universal affordable quality healthcare that includes the specific healthcare needs of trans communities.  But it is my belief that we need to work towards these goals first before considering the removal of GID from the DSM.

In the meantime, we can learn a lot from the disability rights movement.  Like how a diagnosis or a disability is not necessarily the sum total of your being.  Rather, it is part of who you are – and for some, it can be an empowering part.  Let’s challenge the rampant stigmatization around psychiatric and medical diagnosis. I believe that in engaging in this work and these conversations our movement for collective liberation* will only be made stronger.

* Thanks to Dickerson for introducing me to this term!

AVORY: Thanks so much for bringing this topic up, Kyla!  As our readers are about to learn, I have a lot to say on the subject…

There are two basic strains to the diagnosis question, as I see it.  One is the narrow definition of what “transition” means.  The other is the connection you’ve identified between transgender identity and (dis)ability.

First, what is transition?

There is one fairly well recognized, if not well understood medical model that involves a cognitive distance between gender identity and “physical sex,” followed by therapy, GID diagnosis, and physical transition from one binary gender to the other through some combination of hormones and surgery.  In this process, some might argue that there is a clear end point to transition, that once a person has completed surgery/ies and is living as the “opposite” gender, he or she “has transitioned.”  Of course, there are attendant social and legal elements to this–friends and family recognizing the transition, gender marker being changed on ID documents, etc.

Of course, this isn’t exactly what everyone who is MTF or FTM and chooses to medically transition goes through.  Some do all these steps but don’t identify with their gender exactly the way their therapist wants.  Not everyone who completes these steps considers transition “complete” or wants to pass as cisgender.  Moving out from this narrow definition, there then those who choose limited or no surgical intervention, but do take hormones.  There are those who do not take hormones.  There are those who are perfectly happy with what others perceive as a “male” body while using a female name, pronouns, and identity (and vice versa).  And there are non-binary folks like me, or binary trans folks who aren’t quite comfortable with the straight-line transition narrative from one gender to the “opposite.”

The point of all this is that the GID diagnosis, and the recognized standards of care around that diagnosis, narrow the cultural and legal understanding of “transition.”  Most trans people know that there are many ways to transition, but those outside the community may continue to see transition very narrowly, and reject those who do not fit the model.  Lawmakers also tend to make law based on what medicine says about trans people, so in some cases the GID definition limits ability to legally transition.

GID also privileges certain forms of gender expression, and certain transition paths, over others.  In order to get a GID diagnosis, some trans people have to drastically alter their authentic gender presentation to “convince” a therapist or be eligible for medical intervention.  Some non-binary people, for example, would be more comfortable having chest surgery, but in order to convince a doctor that this surgery is needed, have to fit into an FTM or MTF mold.

The second issue, as Kyla points out, is the connection between transgender and (dis)ability.

What is disability?  Often, it is an inability to do things in the “normal” way.  Most people perceive things through sight and sound, so those who cannot see or hear are seen as “disabled.”  Most people move through the world by walking on their feet, so those who use prosthetic limbs or roll down the street in a chair are seen as “disabled.”  There wouldn’t be a concept of disability without a concept of ability, or the “normal” way of doing things.

This frame doesn’t only apply to things we think of as disability-related.  Some examples:

– It’s “weird” to talk with your hands instead of your mouth

– It’s “weird” to express yourself very emotionally, or to express yourself very infrequently

– It’s “weird” not to think and feel within a certain realm of acceptable thoughts and feelings

– It’s “weird” to prefer the same sex

– It’s “weird” to have multiple partners

– It’s “weird” to have a gender that doesn’t culturally “match” chromosomal or physical “sex”

Those who are perceived as “weird” often form distinct communities based on different ways of doing things.  Because of privilege, the majority doesn’t generally question its view of what’s “normal” and what’s “weird,” but those in a particular community may consider their version perfectly normal.  For example, in the Deaf community, communicating through sign language is not considered a “disability.”  Many transgender people, similarly, don’t see themselves or their friends as having a “disorder.”

These differing perceptions, unsurprisingly, tend to create rifts between communities.  The idea of “ability” or “normality” is used by the majority as a protective mechanism.  If you’re weird, I’m okay.  There’s a discomfort with different ways of doing things, because if those ways are normal, the majority has to question its own ways.  Both the disability model and the gender binary are a kind of line-drawing that makes the majority comfortable.  I am on one side of the line, you are on the other.

From the perspective of someone on the “other” side of the line, these categories may seem quite arbitrary.  For example, I recently read a post on Sociological Images about two runners who use prostheses.  There is a resistance to allowing disabled runners to compete alongside those running on their natural legs, explained by the possibility of some advantage being conferred by the prosthesis.  A prosthesis is seen as an “unnatural” advantage, but we don’t say the same about very tall basketball players or very short gymnasts.  Similarly, we have no problem with people being beautiful, happy, or comfortable in their gender without surgery or hormones, but those who need medical intervention to reach this state are seen as “wrong.”

The fact is, there’s nothing inherently wrong or unnatural about having a gender that doesn’t “correspond” in our cultural understanding to chromosome makeup or birth genitalia.  It’s difficult to be transgender because of stigma, social harm, lack of access to care, and other reasons.  Many of the justifications for putting transgender in the DSM are based on the social response to trans identities and the harm it causes to trans people, rather than on the simple state of being transgender.  It’s a disorder because society defines order.

This is not to minimize what it’s like to live in a body that feels wrong.  Even if these societal harms didn’t exist, if we were correctly gendered no matter what our bodies looked like, there would likely still be dysphoria and some people would still need surgery to feel right in their bodies.  But it is unclear why we should treat this need for surgical correction as indicating a disorder.  Is having wisdom teeth a disorder?  Are the cultural and ritual changes that take place in many other areas indicative of a disorder?  When we look at it this way, the norm of having the same sex characteristics throughout life seems rather arbitrary, kind of like talking with our mouths rather than our hands.

Like people with disabilities, transgender people are harmed by others not understanding the way we perceive the world, by lack of education, and by difficulty finding affirming community.

This brings us back to the question of the GID diagnosis, and the benefits Kyla points out–access to healthcare and the use of GID in discrimination claims.  Those benefits are real, and I agree that there are big changes we need to make before taking transgender out of the medical sphere entirely will benefit trans people.  However, I would argue that there should be a change in the DSM to less stigmatizing vocabulary.  The DSM-V criteria under consideration offer a mostly workable concept of gender dysphoria.

I’m not an expert in diagnostic criteria, and so I can’t guess what the implications of the revision being considered would be.  However, I do think it makes sense to frame gender transition as something (covered by insurance) that some need and some don’t.  A condition doesn’t have to be a stigmatized disorder to ensure access and insurance coverage.  For example, near-sightedness isn’t a stigmatized problem–you just get glasses.  Birth control for contraceptive purposes is covered as a legitimate form of preventive care.  I can even imagine framing transition as preventive care–not a sign of a disorder, but something that is necessary to prevent later health problems.

The bottom line for me is that we have to have a serious paradigm shift as a society, and I think the DSM-V provides at least one opportunity to start making that change.

KYLA: I love the idea of using conversations around DSM revisions as an opportunity for paradigm shifts!  That is such an exciting re-framing of what has typically been a very painful conversation.

I also want to use this opportunity to contextualize coverage for birth control.  Yes, it’s fantastic that about 9 in 10 employer-sponsored insurance plans now cover a full range of prescription contraceptions.  But this is only thanks to over two decades of hard core activism, a history which may be too easily forgotten.  Gloria Feldt lays out this strategy in her final chapter of The War on Choice and the National Women’s Law Center has a handy-dandy timeline of this push for coverage of contraceptives.  You can also read about the first big victory in 1998 where activists successfully used insurance coverage of Viagra to point out the absurdity of not covering birth control.  It’s important to remember this history, especially in light of the backlash to President Obama’s recent mandate for birth control coverage and this week’s no-girls-allowed Congressional hearing on birth control.

When it comes to insurance, there are many battle fronts to fight on.  Perhaps this is another opportunity to use the collective liberation strategy to push for real change that leaves no one behind.

This Valentine’s Day, I’ve already posted on my own blog about a frustrating tendency for those writing about feminism and dating to focus on heterosexual relationships.  The idea seems to be that most of the problems with modern romance are focused on gender differences and the tension created by struggles for gender equality.  Researchers and popular writers alike are concerned by the differences between men and women, how women’s successes affect their ability to start families, the impact of gender equality on inherently unequal dating scripts, and whether men or women want, do, or think X more.

Perhaps queerness is simply a complicating variable that a lot of researchers don’t want to get into, particularly when asking questions about male/female difference in dating and romance.  Certainly there are some researchers working on queer relationship issues, particularly on the difference between queer and straight couples, but for this Valentine’s Day “Relating Radically” column, I really want to focus on some questions that might get to the creative and radical core of queerness–something that isn’t exclusive to same-sex relating, and doesn’t appear in every same-sex relationship, but is a valuable object of study.

Sample Questions for Further Study:

• How do romantic or sexual partnerships relate to friendships and chosen family relationships in a given queer community?
• How do queers find relationship education in adolescence and adulthood?
• What is the relationship between interpersonal relationships and queer activism?
• What is the role of sex and romance in the life of a queer community?
• How does public and semi-public space function in queer dating?
• How do queers resist romantic scripts of the dominant culture?
• How do transgender identities impact sexual scripts or sexual assumptions?
• How do queer people see their own sexual or relational roles?
• What are community values around relationships and how do they differ between different queer communities?
• How common or normative is monogamy in queer communities and how is it understood?
• How are queer “chosen families” formed?

Similar questions might also be brought up in the classroom where relevant.  Though it may not often be appropriate to question students on their personal romantic experiences, questions about queer romantic values, norms, and practices may come up in the context of certain discussions.  For example, the relationship between the personal and political around the rise of AIDS activism in the 1980s is a particularly interesting example where sexual practice, chosen families, public health, race, activism, and art all intersected at one political moment.  A sociology class might be interested in examining particular sexual or relationship-based queer subcultures.  A women’s studies course looking at the modern family should certainly consider queer families, and perhaps look at alternative family models such as the queer commune or polyamorous relationship structure.

Though the queer dating world is far from idyllic, it does offer some interesting opportunities for discussion.  It is also not hard to see a relationship between feminist and queer values.  One might consider the difference between heteronormative, capitalist-tied gay cultures on the one hand and more creative queer cultures on the other.

I don’t know where to start.

On Monday, one of the fiercest champions of women in science died of breast cancer. I knew Susan more with her work on women in science. Rather, I connected with her around our shared work rather than our shared motherhood. I remember introducing her to my best friend at Blogher 2009, “This is Susan, she’s a rocket scientist. Really!” I’ve rarely ever been so proud of a friend as a colleague and a person.

We shared a student a few years ago. One of the women in my program spent her internship under Susan’s wing. Once I realized this, Susan and I exchanged a flurry of emails about how amazing this young woman is. That student was lucky to have had time to share with Susan. All the students, women and men, who interned with Susan were lucky.

When I say Susan was fierce, let me offer this as an example:

I tried to be nice.

I tried to be quiet.

I tried to keep this site a supportive, welcoming place where e-mentoring could be had for the price of a click.

But really.  REALLY?  When the long-awaited first images of Stardust’s encounter of Tempel 1 were released today, THIS is the headline NASA chose?

NASA Releases Images Of Man-Made Crater On Comet

MAN-Made?  What about the names Lucy, Jessica, and Karen confused you?  Were none of the hundreds of scientists and engineers who worked on Deep Impact women?

NASA.

You know better than this.

You know that language matters, and that women matter to the future of the space agency.

Or, at least, you did.

What happened?

Yup, even as sick as Susan was, she didn’t hesitate to rip NASA for their biased language. That’s why I loved her so.

I’m going to miss my partner in crime.

But when I think of Susan’s fight against breast cancer, she did not just fight for herself, she fought for all of us. She would rant about the lack of funding and research. It wasn’t until the 1990s that women were even expected to be included in breast cancer research (in fact, in any medical trial). There’s a lot of catching up to do and we’re going to need all hands on deck. Men and women.

In Susan’s husband’s post telling us of her passing, he said, “In lieu of flowers, please consider furthering Susan’s legacy through a contribution to the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Or please choose to make a difference somewhere, anywhere, to anyone.”

So there we have it. Our marching orders. Come on everyone, our Warrior Princess has spoken.

Some nice work of my own: The second edition of The Gender of Sexuality: Exploring Sexual Possibilities is out!  Pepper Schwartz and I wrote it in the 1990s, and revising it focused our attention on how sex has changed in a decade+. Here are three examples:

In 2012, same-sex marriage rights have changed dramatically. In 1998, we thought that same-sex marriage was here to stay in the U.S…. but noted that much of the population wasn’t going to like it. At the time, Hawaii had had their flirtation with same-sex marriage rights, Vermont was working on theirs, and Pepper was busy testifying in a number of these cases. Today, a majority of the population believe same-sex marriage rights should be equivalent to cross-sex marriage rights, with each generation becoming increasingly accepting of marriage equality. Six states and the District of Columbia have marriage rights, yet 33 states have laws or constitutional amendments that are “Defense of Marriage Acts” asserting marriage must be between a male and female. The debates have continued to be ugly (such as the experience with Proposition 8 in California and the unspeakable and silly positions of our political candidates) but the change is definitive, and if we have a third edition down the road, I predict marriage equality will be law of the land.

In 2012, gender differences in sexual freedom have become a lot more subtle. In 1998 we said “the more things change the more they remain the same” with respect to gender. What we meant was that women had benefited a lot from the sexual revolution–and had an increased amount of sexual and social freedom relative to some remote past. So, by the 1990s, a young single woman’s (like a man’s) having ever had sex did not, in general, affect her reputation, but her having had, say, more than five partners was judged more harshly than a man’s being known to have done the same. Studies continue to show gender difference in sexual experience, but the numbers change and there is more diversity by subgroups. Think of the issue of pleasure. When we looked at research on hooking up from the past decade, studies showed how in college “hook ups” men were more likely to have an orgasm, or receive oral sex, if it is a first hook up. But as more hook ups occurred, women in such encounters experienced pleasure more often. Could be an issue of skills. Could be an issue of reticence. Things have changed. But the persistence of a gap has remained. I often write about how gender inequality is sneaky; part of the sneakiness is that sometimes when one gender gap narrows, a new one opens up….

In 2012, transgender statuses are much more in the public consciousness. In 1998, we gave the most sparing attention to transgender people and transgender experiences. A decade later, we were stunned to see this lapse in our own book. The transgender experience in the US and across the globe continues to be challenging. But transgender experience is no longer an “exotic outlier” that few people have heard about or recognize the value of understanding. The debate over rules in Canada’s “Passenger Protect” program (think U.S. “no fly” practices) that stipulate that people must appear to be the gender (by which they really mean “biological sex”) indicated on their identification makes the point. On the one hand this appears to be an insane regulation even for those who don’t strictly identify as transgender. It is particularly hostile to those who are transitioning, or who don’t intend to medically transition, but live as one gender while being another biological sex. On the other hand, the dialogue, which you can see in the Washington Post or Huffington Post or many blogs dedicated to trans themes, foregrounds a wider public consciousness (if not perfect understanding) of the issues than we saw in the 1990s.

And that is just the first couple of pages of the book! I hope you’ll check it out.

–Virginia Rutter

A few years back I was a regular blogger about the Roe v. Wade anniversary. As it turns out, the last post I wrote about Roe v. Wade was in 2008. That would be a blog post I wrote while I was already pregnant with Maybelle but wasn’t publicly announcing it. I was intentionally, happily pregnant, and I was still adamantly in favor of women’s reproductive rights. This is an important thing to recognize.

I’ve obviously had a lot of other stuff going on since then. I’ve been blogging a lot about parenthood, and about disability rights. But this year I’d like to return to the old tradition and write a post offering a shout out to women’s reproductive freedom.

As I’ve always said, a woman’s control over her own reproduction affects every aspect of her life. Every aspect. So I maintain now, as I always have, that we must give women the right to end a pregnancy if they don’t want to be pregnant, and the pregnant women themselves are the ones who get to decide why they don’t want to be pregnant. It’s not a decision that other folks should have a legal right to weigh in on.

I also want to say that I’ve been pretty powerfully influenced by readings I’ve been doing about reproductive justice. When feminists talk about reproductive rights, generally they’re talking–as I am here–about the right to have an abortion. And this is hugely important. But reproductive justice expands that concept. Scholar Kimala Price explains that the reproductive justice movement’s “three core values are: the right to have an abortion, the right to have children, and the right to parent those children.” If we really want women to have control over their reproduction, that doesn’t just mean that they get to choose not to be pregnant. It also means that they get to choose to have and parent children.

Here’s another great quote from Dorothy Roberts in Killing the Black Body (please note that if you’re in my capstone course, this is the book we’re discussing on Thursday):

Reproductive liberty must encompass more than the protection of an individual woman’s choice to end her pregnancy. It must encompass the full range of procreative activities, including the ability to bear a child, and it must acknowledge that we make reproductive decisions within a social context, including inequalities of wealth and power. Reproductive freedom is a matter of social justice, not individual choice.

Why is this particularly important to me these days? Because I’m doing research on prenatal testing, and we know that when a person has prenatal testing and learns that the fetus has Down syndrome, 90% of those fetuses are terminated. And we all know that when 90% of a group is doing something, it’s no longer a matter of simple “choice.” As Roberts notes in the quotes above, we’re not simply individuals in a bubble, with 90% randomly choosing termination. “We make reproductive decisions within a social context,” and our social context tends to tell us that kids with Down syndrome are no good. Defective product. Best to get rid of that fetus and start over.

Biffle and I didn’t decide to get rid of that fetus, and we’re incredibly glad about that.

I’m adamant that we–and all other potential parents–should have the right to terminate any pregnancy that’s unwanted. My ability to choose not to be pregnant is as important now as it’s ever been in my life, if not moreso.

But I also see it as part of my reproductive activism to change the social context that would identify my daughter as a defective product (and the word “defective” is often used in descriptions of Down syndrome, trust me–that’s not me being hyperbolic). I want to change the inaccurate perceptions of Down syndrome that not only affect people’s decisions while pregnant, but that affect the options available to folks who are here in the world: school inclusion, for instance, college possibilities, media representations, availability of jobs.

Is it a stretch to say that programs like REACH are connected to my reproductive justice activism? Maybe a tiny stretch, but only tiny, because if I’d known while I was pregnant that I was soon going to be teaching people with Down syndrome in my college classes, that would have immediately challenged the stereotypes of Down syndrome that were frolicking unnoticed in my mind.

Perhaps I would have had a clue that the thing that’s really challenging is parenting.  The hardest things for me about being a parent have nothing at all to do with Down syndrome.  Learning ASL so that Maybelle can communicate earlier?  Easy and fun!  Dealing with a person in your house who says “NO!” to every single question you ask?  Challenging (and developmentally appropriate)!

Alright, so hurray for Roe v. Wade.  People who can get pregnant don’t have full humanity unless they have the right to control their own bodies.  And hurray for reproductive justice, which reminds us that reproduction is a far larger issue than abortion, an issue that urges us to make the world a place worth living in.

The end. (Cross-posted at Baxter Sez.)

Thanks to University of Wisconsin – Madison researchers for another study that says girls can do math!

We’ve been here before. I’m not blaming them. This research needed to be done. I wish it didn’t. But it does. This study does not only address if girls can do math or not, but it also addresses the frequent “solution” to helping girls do well in math and science — single-gender education.

From the conclusions of the paper:

[W]e conclude that gender equity and other sociocultural factors, not national income, school type, or religion per se, are the primary determinants of mathematics performance at all levels for both boys and girls. Our findings are consistent with the gender stratified hypothesis, but not with the greater male variability, gap due to inequity, single-gender classroom, or Muslim culture hypotheses.

In other words, the gap we see between girls and boys math ability is due to society and culture. “[T]hese major international studies strongly suggest that the maths gender gap, where it occurs, is due to cultural factors that differ among countries – and that these factors can be changed.”

It is not due to some mystery math gene on the Y-chromosome (greater male variability), not due to more boys having access to math classes (inequity), not due to separating boys from girls nor is it due to some mystery about Muslim culture. The last one is the most odd theory some people cling in order to not see that gender equity in society has an effect on girls and math performance. It was in Freakanomics. Essentially it goes like this: Since girls in Muslim societies have little equity, but they do awesome in math, feminism/gender equity has nothing to do with girls doing math.

‘The girls living in some Middle Eastern countries, such as Bahrain and Oman, had, in fact, not scored very well, but their boys had scored even worse, a result found to be unrelated to either Muslim culture or schooling in single-gender classrooms,’ says Kane.

He suggests that Bahraini boys may have low average math scores because some attend religious schools whose curricula include little mathematics.

Also, some low-performing girls drop out of school, making the tested sample unrepresentative of the whole population. [cite]

The Muslim society theory depends on the strength of single-gender classroom theory. Kane and Mertz also debunks this beloved theory on how to combat the lack of girls in math and science. Other studies have tried to debunk the single-gender classroom/school theory by pointing out that most single-gender schools have smaller classrooms. I only say “try” because some people have ignored them.

Last month my office co-sponsored a Girls and Computer Science Day for high school girls. During the lunch Q&A panel where some of our undergraduate and graduate women in CS talked about how awesome our CS department is, I chimed in. I told the girls that our quest to see more girls in CS is not merely a pro-girl movement, rather it is a movement to ensure that we have as many heads at that table as possible when solving problems our world is facing. I don’t do my job just to get girls and women into science and engineering to get the numbers up. Rather women and girls add something to the process of how science and engineering is done. It is not that women do better science, but with women at the table, science is better. Kane and Mertz sum it up pretty well in their concluding remarks:

Eliminating gender discrimination in pay and employment opportunities could be part of a win-win formula for producing an adequate supply of future workers with high-level competence in mathematics. Wealthy countries that fail to provide gender equity in employment are at risk of producing too few citizens of either gender with the skills necessary to compete successfully in a knowledge-based economy driven by science and technology.

Now that we’ve settled these questions, let’s get back in the lab and get some science done, shall we?

Please go visit a tumblr that two of my students created.  It’s fantastic.  They’ve been a bit astonished at how much attention it’s gotten in the 30 hours its been online, but when you go over, you’ll see why:  it’s interesting, the photography is stunning, and the explanations of feminism are smart and clever.

Let me just say right now, I want in!