science/technology

Duff sent in a video showing candidates from the 2011 Miss USA contest answering the question, “Should evolution be taught in schools?” Their answers are a great example of the normalization of the idea that evolution is “one side” of a story, with religion being the other side, and that we should just choose between these two stories based on what we’re most comfortable with personally:

There’s a striking discourse here of allowing children (or, by extension, their parents) to “choose” whether to learn about evolution or whether it’s a perspective they like, in a way we don’t apply to other scientific theories. I suspect if you allowed students to choose, they might, just perhaps, decide that calculus, grammatical rules, and the laws of physics aren’t things they happen to feel like learning, a fact that most curriculum review committees see as rather irrelevant.

This discourse of choice works, in part, because of the word “theory.” In popular usage, “theory” is often used as though it’s interchangeable with “idea” or “opinion” or “random thought I just made up in my head right now.” Of course, scientists use the word in a very different way, and the scientific process is to test theories and find evidence for or against them. But the conflation of “theory” in the scientific sense with “opinion” in the public-usage sense facilitates the discourse of choice.

I suspect that some watching the video will see this as little more than an example of air-headed, dumb women not understanding science. But it’s important to remember that these women are carefully prepped for this competition; they have been through years of lower-level beauty pageant competitions and, to get to the Miss USA contest, they’ve clearly learned the rules of the beauty pageant circuit. They may or may not personally completely agree with what they’re saying; the point is to provide an answer that they believe is most likely to appeal to a group of judges who are looking for a candidate who will be palatable to a broad audience and unlikely to stir controversy. Whatever their personal opinions might be, the women are providing an answer based on a perception of what the most acceptable response is — and the discourse of choice is sufficiently normalized to be a viable, and perhaps the only viable, option they can give and hope to win.

And, if you’re interested, here’s a parody video asking if math should be taught in schools:

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

Cross-posted at Scientopia.

The U.S. Department of Commerce just released a report on the continuing gender gap in STEM jobs – that is, science, technology, engineering, and math. While women make up roughly half of the total paid workforce, they still held only a quarter of STEM jobs as of 2009:

In fact, we saw no change in the gender make-up of STEM fields between 2000 and 2009.

There is significant variation in the gender composition within the STEM category, however. At the high end, women hold 40% of jobs in the physical and life sciences; the low point is engineering, where only 14% of employees are women. And the proportion of women in computer science and math jobs actually fell between 2000 and 2009, from 30% to 27% of workers.

This isn’t simply because of differences in education, either. Here we see the proportion of both men and women in STEM jobs at various educational levels; while increased education correlates with a higher likelihood of having a STEM job for both groups, women are significantly less likely than men at every educational level to have a STEM job:

The gender disparity in STEM jobs is especially noteworthy because, on average, STEM occupations pay significantly more than other private-sector jobs, and the gender gap in pay is actually lower than in non-STEM sectors:

If we look only at women with bachelor’s degrees, women who earn STEM degrees and work in STEM jobs earn, on average, 29% more than other women.

So the underrepresentation of women in STEM jobs means that women are missing out on some of the best-paying occupations in the U.S.; in fact, this type of gender-segregation of jobs is one of the leading causes of gender gap in yearly and lifetime earnings.

The authors of the report don’t go into detail about potential causes of the gender gap in STEM careers, though they note that among those earning STEM degrees in college, women are significantly less likely than men to hold jobs in related STEM fields. They suggest this might be because STEM jobs are relatively unaccommodating to those who take time off for family obligations (disproportionately women), because of a lack of female role models in STEM fields (including as college professors), or because of gender stereotyping about math or science aptitude (like this, or this if you prefer a t-shirt) that pushes women away from STEM degrees and careers. [UPDATE: Broken links fixed!]

The complex interplay of factors that lead to a gender gap in who holds STEM-sector jobs provides significant challenges to increasing the proportion of women in these occupations — as indicated by the lack of change over the past decade. But particularly as we see increasing economic divergence between well-paid tech and information sector and low-paid service sector jobs, addressing the underrepresentation of women in STEM jobs will be essential as part of any effort to improve women’s lifetime earnings potential and overall economic outlook.

Today, the field of computer science is heavily male-dominated — men earn the vast majority of undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in the field. But this wasn’t always true. When computers were first developed, we weren’t sure what kind of job programming was, whether a highly technical scientific occupation or a more secretarial-type one akin to being a typist. The fluidity of the developing field initially attracted significant numbers of women.

Anjan G. sent in an example of the normalization of computer programming as a female occupation, posted at Fog Creek. This article appeared in a 1967 issue of Cosmopolitan and quotes computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper, a pioneer in the field, discussing why programming is a perfect fit for women — by drawing partly on gender stereotypes by assuming women are “naturals” at programming because they’re patient and pay attention to details:

You can find a larger image here.

Also, if you’re interested, Fog Creek, a software company, looked at their own data to see if male and female job applicants have equal chances of getting hired, and they posted an interview with the only woman working on their technical staff, an intern.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

Changes in language seem to just happen. Nobody sets out to introduce a change, but suddenly people are saying “groovy” or “my bad.” And then they’re not. Even written language changes, though the evolution is slower.

Last weekend, I saw this sign at a goat farm on Long Island.

WER’E ??

I used to care about the apostrophe, but after years of reading student papers about “different society’s,” I have long accepted that the tide is against me. The apostrophe today is where spelling was a few hundred years ago – you can pretty much make up your own rules.

Sometimes the rule is fairly clear: use an apostrophe in plurals when leaving it out makes the word look like a different word rather than a plural form of the original. Change the “y” in “society” to “ies” and it looks too different. “Of all the cafe’s, I like the one with lime martini’s.” The “correct” version is cafes and martinis. but I think they take a nanosecond or two longer to mentally process.

Or these

Technically, it should be “ON DVDS.” But DVDS looks like it’s some government agency (I gotta go down to the DVDS tomorrow) or maybe a disease.

It’s not always easy to figure out what rule or logic the writer is following. The little apostrophe seems to be plunked in almost at random. Not random, really. It’s usually before an “s.” But why does Old Navy say, “Nobody get’s hurt”?

There’s a prescriptivist Website, ApostropheAbuse.com, that collects these (that’s where I found the DVDS and Old Navy pictures). They’re fighting a losing battle.

Technology matters – I guess that’s the sociological point here. The invention of print and then the widespread dissemination of identical texts herded us towards standardization. Printers became a separate professional group (not part of the church or state), and most of them were in the same place (London). They had a stranglehold on published spelling.

For the last few decades, anyone could be a printer. The page you are now reading might harbor countless errors in punctuation and spelling (though spell-checkers greatly reduce misspellings), but it looks just as good as an online article in the Times, and it’s published in a similar way to potentially as many readers. And now there’s texting. It’s already pushing upper case letters off the screen, and the apostrophe forecast doesn’t look so good either. But what will still be interesting is not the missing apostrophe but the apostrophe added where, by traditional rules, it doesn’t belong.

I still can’t figure out WER’E.

When someone gave us this chunky dinosaur puzzle, I did a double-take. Yes, that’s a caveman there with the dinosaurs:

The blurb on the company’s website says that, along with the puzzle, “ The accompanying board book teaches young learners about dinosaurs.” Teaches, that is, with lessons like this:

A little harmless fun, or a little creationist indoctrination? (Do sociologists even believe in “harmless fun”?)

According to the Shure company, they deliver these “common threads” in all their products: “Originality and inventiveness; Excellence in design; Attention to detail; Exceptional quality; Educational merit.” So, not just entertainment.

A quick perusal suggests the rest of their products are not creationist — just the usual toy-gendering. They do have a Noah’s Ark puzzle, but it doesn’t claim to be educational. In that Shure is just keeping up Melissa & Doug (whose puzzle is at least Genesis-correct in not naming Noah’s wife):

And anyway, the story of Noah’s Ark is actually not a bad way to talk about reproduction.

But back to dinosaurs and people. Dinosaurs are not really more problematic for creationism than any other creatures that pre-date humans. But maybe because kids love dinosaurs so much, creationists spend inordinate energy trying to place them chronologically with people. Writes one such site:

The idea of millions of years of evolution is just the evolutionists’ story about the past. No scientist was there to see the dinosaurs live through this supposed dinosaur age. In fact, there is no proof whatsoever that the world and its fossil layers are millions of years old. No scientist observed dinosaurs die. Scientists only find the bones in the here and now, and because many of them are evolutionists, they try to fit the story of the dinosaurs into their view.

Up against this kind of propaganda, it is tempting to bring the hammer down on “harmless fun” featuring humans and dinosaurs playing together. That would mean no B.C. comic, no Flinstones, and no Barney either. That is basically the argument of James Wilson, a University of Sussex lecturer, who has a talk on the subject here on Youtube.

In any case, we may be so used to seeing toys or other products like this — with humans and dinosaurs side-by-side — that we forget to ask whether they’re teaching kids a lesson, one that is at odds with science.

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By the way, for non-biologists, like me, who like evolution and want some ammunition to defend it, I recommend Richard Dawkins’ recent book The Greatest Show on Earth. Some do find it a little dogmatic, and in the grand scheme I prefer Stephen Jay Gould, but it’s good for this purpose. Because rather than block access to dinosaur cartoons, I would rather arm myself – and the surrounding children – with the tools they need to handle them with confidence.

Philip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality. You can follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

In this 10-minute video, Cindy Gallop argues that young men are getting a false sex education from pornography. The average age that kids first view porn is 11-years-old and, by the time that boys are men, they have learned to imitate the kind of sex that they see in pornography. She argues that this effect — the way that porn is shaping our actual sexual behavior — is the greatest impact of technology on human behavior. Period.

Not opposed to porn, Gallop nevertheless believes that we need a counterpoint to porn so that we get a more diverse set of messages about sexuality (not dissimilar to the argument I make about hook up culture).

In service of her message, Gallop also has a TED Talk, a short book, and a website, Make Love Not Porn, with some great content.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

In the 1940s and ’50s dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, a synthetic pesticide better known as DDT, was used to kill bugs that spread malaria and typhus in several parts of the world.  DDT was argued to be toxic to humans and the environment in the famous environmental opus, Silent Spring.  It was banned by the U.S. government in 1972.

Before all that, though, it was sprayed in American neighborhoods to suppress insect populations. The new movie Tree of Life has a great scene re-enacting the way that children would frolick in the spray as the DDT trucks went by. Here are two screen shots from the trailer:

Searching around, I also found some vintage footage (the person who uploaded the clip doesn’t specify the documentary):

The scene reminded me of an old post we’d written, below, featuring advertisements for the pesticide, one with the ironic slogan “DDT is good for Me-e-e!”

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DDT was a pesticide marketed to housewives (and many others). We later discovered it to be an environmental toxin. Below are three of the advertisements (via Mindfully and KnowDrama and noticed thanks to John L.):

DDT-laced wallpaper, from Copyranter:

(text for this final ad after the jump)

more...

Cross-posted at OWNI.

Our BoingBoing friend, Cory Doctorow, has a great Ted Talk in which he gives an inspired and radical solution to the lack of privacy on the internet. To begin, he notes that Facebook, as just one example, doesn’t just allow, but incites disclosure by rewarding it, but only intermittently (a la B.F. Skinner and the Skinner box).

Meanwhile, parents try to protect children from disclosure and exposure with surveillance tools that block and report content.  This, Doctorow argues provocatively, only trains kids to accept surveillance as normal and unproblematic.  Instead of spying on our kids, he suggests, we should be teaching them to manipulate and avert involuntary disclosure, such that they grow up learning to question instead of accept the use and abuse of their personal information.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.