Many women need to work (and other obvious truths) June 10, 2009

This is an excellent Broadsheet post.

The New York Times and New York magazine seem to be in an arms race to see who can produce the most stories about laid-off investment bankers (often with retro gender caricatures about the emasculating effects of childcare and the requisite high-maintenance trophy wives). “When hourly wage-earning workers enter these stories,” writes Boushey, it’s usually as ‘perks’ that wealthier families have had to give up — the nanny, the gardener, the nail technician — not as people struggling just to make it through the financial crunch.”…

The relentless focus on professional women’s “choice” in work over the past decade has fed the myth that working for pay is somehow more of an optional exercise in self-actualization than what the vast majority of adults must do to quite literally feed and shelter themselves and their families.

The post at Broadsheet notes, though, that at least some articles are starting to break from this mold. (And it gives lots of links, which I haven’t yet had a chance to read.)

This series of articles not only rightly insists that we focus our attention on the women who need it most, but also offers well-researched, concrete suggestions that can help get us there. Let’s hope it’s part of a new trend.

Thanks, Jender-Parents!

The Swayzaur (FP Relevance Challenge) June 10, 2009

Much adulation to whoever finds an excuse for me putting this up. Please, please give me a reason that this is relevant to feminist philosophy. (Thanks, Kate!)

SWIP UK panel at Joint Sessions June 10, 2009

SWIP UK will be hosting a panel session of papers devoted to topics in any
area of interest to women in philosophy, at the Joint Sessions of the
Aristotelian Society and Mind Association, at University of East Anglia,
July 10th-12th.

Please find below details of the programme. There will also be a SWIP UK
meeting, at which more information about the activities of SWIP UK will be
available, on Sunday 12th, 13.00-14.00.

SWIP UK panel session at the Joint Sessions, 2009
Sunday 12th July, 14.00-16.00

Dr Sandrine Berges
University of Bilkent (Turkey)
‘Why women hug their chains: Wollstonecraft and adaptive preferences’

Kathy Butterworth
University of Kent
‘The Possibility of a Decentred Autonomous Subject’

Dr Mari Mikkola
University of Lancaster
‘Illocution, Silencing & the Act of Refusal’

Dr Steinvör Arnadottir
Stirling
‘A Response to the Corpse Problem’

For further information, please contact Dawn Phillips, at
Dawn.Phillips@warwick.ac.uk or Jules Holroyd at jh671@cam.ac.uk

SWIP UK Webpage: http://www.dur.ac.uk/swipuk/
This panel is part of the Joint Sessions: registration for the Joint
Sessions as usual is required. See http://js2009.webapp2.uea.ac.uk/

CFP: Workshop in Feminist Political theory June 9, 2009

Call for Papers: Workshop in Feminist Political Theory

Manchester Workshops in Political Theory
2-4 September 2009
Manchester Metropolitan University

Politics has always been at the heart of feminism. The wide variety of traditions of feminist thought and activism have engaged in diverse and rich ways with politics and the political. But the landscape of feminist political theory is marked by the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, and by the different strands in women’s and gender studies. This workshop aims to engage constructively with these differences, by inviting papers from all traditions in feminist political theory, both from the centers and the margins, on any topic. Furthermore, it invites papers that address and challenge the traditional divisions, or that focus on their intersections.

Please send a 300 word abstract to Annelies Decat (K.U.Leuven) or Janice Richardson (University of Exeter) by June 30th: Annelies.Decat@hiw.kuleuven.be or Janice.Richardson@exeter.ac.uk

This workshop is part of the sixth annual series of Workshops in Political Theory, at the Manchester Metropolitan University. For more information, visit the conference website:

http://www.hlss.mmu.ac.uk/polphil/news/article.php?id=306

Keep UK libel laws out of science! June 9, 2009

You may have noticed our shiny new widget over to the right: we’re supporting the campaign launched by the charity ‘Sense about Science’ to keep UK libel laws out of science. 

What’s this about?

Well, last year the British Chiropractic Association decided to sue the science writer Simon Singh for libel after he criticised them for promoting the use of chiropractic to treat children with conditions such as asthma and colic – treatments which he described as “bogus”.  Whatever you believe about the efficacy of “alternative medicine”, if you care about freedom of speech you should support the open discussion of evidence rather than the silencing which results from libel cases.  (And this isn’t the first relevant case – Ben Goldacre, author of the Bad Science blog and column, was sued by Matthias Rath for expressing concerns about Rath’s promotion of vitamin pills to treat AIDS in South Africa. Rath withdrew his case, but for more than a year Goldacre was unable to discuss the issue and had to omit an entire chapter from his book ‘Bad Science’.) 

There’s been lots of discussion about this case: the legal blogger Jack of Kent has set out the legal issues; you can read Simon Singh’s own account of the last year; journalist Nick Cohen provides some background and puts it in the context of ‘libel tourism’, where the UK’s libel laws are used by (for instance) Saudi businessmen against US publications simply because content is available online.  Things have got so bad the states of New York and Illinois are drafting legislation to protect people from the decisions of UK courts on libel.  

All this matters because people need access to information about science and health, open discussion improves the quality of evidence, and blogs like this one need freedom of speech to be protected.  We should all be worried about the chilling effect of UK libel law.

Education and aspiration, gender and class. June 9, 2009

An important report from the Equality and Human Rights Commission draws attention to the low aspirations that it appears schools (amongst myriad other factors, surely) are fostering in girls from working class backgrounds (reported on here):

Trevor Phillips [chair of the commission] said: “The majority of young women who come from working-class backgrounds believe they will fail. They believe the best they can do is to be a hairdresser or work in one of the three Cs: catering, childcare or cleaning. These are proper careers and I don’t want to do them down. The problem is we have a society where young girls who aren’t from well-off professional families can’t see themselves as successful in anything but a limited range of jobs

And from the report:

Girls’ attitudes to career choice remain traditional despite moves towards gender equality in wider society. Regardless of socio-economic background, the top three jobs girls believed they would be working in were teaching, childcare and beauty. Four times more boys compared to girls believed they would go into engineering, with similar percentages of boys over girls choosing building, architecture, trade and IT careers.

Poor career and subject advice was also highlighted as a major problem, with information provided to young people often reinforcing class, gender, ethnic and disability stereotypes.

Importantly, a range of recommendations are made to try to alter these failings:

Recommendations made by the Commission in the report include:

• Reviewing the current £30 a week Education Maintenance Allowance with a consideration to increase the maintenance.
• Further Education colleges to consider offering vocational courses to young people who have no GCSEs as a way of re-engaging 16 year olds who leave school without any qualifications.
• The Department of Children, Schools and Families to introduce work experience and vocational options earlier to students
• The Commission to work with the National Apprenticeships Service on initiatives to open up apprenticeships to women, people with disabilities and ethnic minorities.

Anonymous blogging June 8, 2009

A blogger at Obsidian Wings has been outed (i.e., had his real identity revealed).  The NY Times has an interesting collation of pieces on anonymity in response, and Jender had earlier taken the topic on here.  But since it is in the news, I thought it worth quoting a piece from publius, now know to be John Blevins:

I have blogged under a pseudonym largely for private and professional reasons.  Professionally, I’ve heard that pre-tenure blogging (particularly on politics) can cause problems.  And before that, I was a lawyer with real clients.  I also believe that the classroom should be as nonpolitical as possible – and I don’t want conservative students to feel uncomfortable before they take a single class based on my posts.  So I don’t tell them about this blog.  Also, I write and research on telecom policy – and I consider blogging and academic research separate endeavors.  This, frankly, is a hobby.Privately, I don’t write under my own name for family reasons.  I’m from a conservative Southern family – and there are certain family members who I’d prefer not to know about this blog (thanks Ed [Whelan, who did the outing]).  Also, I have family members who are well known in my home state who have had political jobs with Republicans, and I don’t want my posts to jeopardize anything for them (thanks again).

The reasons Jender has given are largely similar, but there are some interesting differences.  The main difference to my mind is that  for women bloggers (and surely some others) there is also a very alarming number of harassments, which we don’t want any of us to go through..

A different ‘what’s missing?’… June 8, 2009

Come on, Independent. Their survey of pram price/style/practicality includes pictures of parents with their prams (and their children). Sorry, did I say parents? Mothers. Only one picture in 11 contains  a man. I’d have hoped the often gender-equality-minded Independent might have looked a bit harder for some male pram pushers (surely not *that* hard to find) rather than reinforcing the gender norm.

British Fascism Goes to the EU June 8, 2009

‘Fascist’ is a word that gets thrown around a lot on the left, and many could be forgiven for thinking that using it to describe the new BNP members of the European Parliament is just one of those instances. But here’s Andrew Brons, new representative for Yorkshire and Humber:

It was on Hitler’s birthday, deliberately chosen, that the National Socialist Movement was formed in Britain in the 1960s. It was the first political organisation of the far right that Andrew Brons, the newly-elected British National party MEP for Yorkshire and Humberside, was to join – but not the last…

The group he first joined included among its members people responsible for arson attacks on Jewish property and synagogues. According to the anti-fascist organisation Searchlight, which has been tracking his career for decades, Brons appears to have approved. In a letter to Jordan’s wife, Brons reported meeting an NSM member who “mentioned such activities as bombing synagogues”, to which Brons responded that “on this subject I have a dual view, in that I realise that he is well intentioned, I feel that our public image may suffer considerable damage as a result of these activities. I am however open to correction on this point.”

By the 1970s, Brons had moved on the National Front, then the leading far-right group in Britain. He was voted on to the NF’s national directorate in 1974 and, as the NF’s education officer, he hosted seminars on racial nationalism and tried to give its racism a more “scientific” basis…
In August 1981 he led a rally in Fulham, west London in support of “rights for whites” and concluded his speech with a call for compulsory repatriation, chanting: “If they’re black, send them back.” According to Searchlight, in 1982 Brons led an NF march through Northfield on which marchers chanted “We’ve got to get rid of the blacks”.

Depressing UK elections June 8, 2009

The British National Party, which is openly and explicitly racist (only whites can join), now holds two seats in the European parliament– and one of those seats went to the head of the party. The biggest UK party at the EU parliament is the Tories, followed by the nationalist, anti-EU UK Independence Party, which thinks pregnant women should resign their jobs. (And the Tories are forging an alliance with Europe’s hard-right). A lot of this is protest voting against all the major parties due to recent expenses scandals (where we learned of such things as a Tory MP charging his constituents for MOAT CLEANING). A lot is also protest-voting specifically against Labour, for which I of course have some sympathy (Iraq war, endless privatisation, etc). It’s may well bring down PM Gordon Brown, and looks certain to bring us a Tory government sooner or later. It’s also bringing out a lot of complaints against Brown, including the claim that he has used women politicians as “window-dressing” rather than taking them seriously. Brown’s reaction is stunningly stupid– he wants to add Alan Sugar, star of the apprentice, to his government. Brilliant: Reality TV stars are just what Labour needs to get taken seriously again. Worse yet, Sugar thinks that maternity leave has gone too far and that employers should be allowed to ask women about child-bearing plans at interviews. It’s pretty hard to imagine who’s still enthusiastic about Labour at this point. But wouldn’t it be nice if Brits could make like the Swedes and give their protest votes to Pirates instead?

Higher Education Policy Institute – Women Doing Ok Now, Men Not Doing So Good June 7, 2009

There are more female students than male students across all universities, and women are more likely than men to gain a first or upper second class degree. Finding out why this is, and helping men achieve their potential seems like a good thing. Unfortunately, some seem to be taking the news to indicate that women have unfairly benefited from previous efforts to ensure their access to education. Others suggest that the imbalance is due to the way that working hard at academic pursuits is considered a feminine virtue by many young men, who think it’s cool not to work hard. They also caution against refocusing on men at the expense of women. The latter seem like good points – although it’s unfortunate that Professor Morley chose to use the phrase ‘castration anxieties’. Diplomacy is an underrated virtue in my book. Here’s the THE story. A word of advice: don’t read the comments if you have high blood pressure.

I should also add, that the article only reports on undergraduates. I suspect things are very different at postgraduate level, or at the very least, vary from subject to subject. There is almost certainly variance across subjects at undergraduate level too. I’m not sure if the HEPI report took that into account.

The Sunday cat and the BBC love baby meerkats June 7, 2009

And who wouldn’t?

 

 

     And who cares if the feisty little male meerkat is judged the best and most interesting.? I mean, we’re talking about a couple of seconds on the BBC nature program, not getting a paper in an Oxford U Press volume.  Though men, I have  to say, you all need to get over yourselves!**

Many thanks to Calypso, who may or may not have sent me this exact link. 

—————————

**This is meant humorously.  I think.

For that special wedding June 6, 2009

One consolation of philosophy consists in the serendipitous connections discovered as one works.  For example, if you are working on the technical disjunction problem then you might start to think about mimicry, one clear example of which occurs in butterflies.  The Monarch Butterfly and the Viceroy Butterfuly are hard to distinguish.  The latter minics the former, which is poisonous.  Looking poisonous is a good thing for butterflies. 

And then, if you research this  on the web, you may well come across electronic wedding butterflies.  Truly!

Electronic monarch butterfly

Isn’t it a great idea  to have electronic butterflies at a wedding?  You can add a live release, thus combining the electric and the – by comparsion – natural.

And in fact, for less than $25, you have you very own electronic butterfly for your office, for example.

 

(I think the pictures both portray electronic butterflies, but I’m not certain.)

NY Times ‘Well’ Blog: This week’s worst column in the world?** June 5, 2009

Dana Jennings was very seriously ill; he had prostate cancer and was given Lupron, which suppresses testosterone.  He says it induced in him a state like menopause.  In addition to severe hot flashes and inconvenient food cravings, he had some emotional effects.  Which led him to announce this conclusion:

Even though I only got to spend a brief time on the outer precincts of menopause, it did confirm my lifelong sense that the world of women is hormonal and mysterious, and that we men don’t have the semblance of a clue.

And, guys, when your significant female other bursts into tears at the drop of a dinner plate or turns on you like a rabid pit bull — whether she’s pregnant, having her period or in the throes of menopause — believe her when she blames it on the hormones.

Yuck!  And double yuck at the roughly 80%+ of the commenters who congratulate him on the beautiful column and his aquired understanding.  Some comments, though, get it.  It isn’t as though men don’ have psychoactive hormones – some of which may well contribute to making some of them rapists, wife-abusers, self-seeking executives who can steal millions and millions, murderers, leaders who take their countries into war in order to prove themselves, and so on. 

So what in the world is going on?  We have the first Latina nominee for the Supreme Court and the right wing is going out of their way to be sexist and disgusting about her.  Liddy is worrying about her peiods!  So just very innocently the NY Times publishes an article suggesting menopausal women are like pit bulls?

Articles like this are not cute.  It is surely strange to suppose that a man undergoing hormone therapy for a brief time will  feel as a woman does.  Among other things, by the time menopause starts most women have had well over 30 years of learning to cope with hormonal changes. 

What about  all those who agree with him?  Well, hot  flashes, cravings and weight gain are not fun.  But in addition, people have an unfortunate tendency to buy into cliches which excuse bad behavior.  It’s like the teenage boys who  think that getting  aroused means they can just say “I couldn’t help myself,” and the charge of rape will go away.

In the meantimes, maybe the NY Times could think a bit before it publishes an article that sides with the far right’s worries about mixing leadership and female hormones.  And if it becomes one of the most emailed articles, maybe they could put something at least in the errata about not actually intending to defame women and recognizing the millions of professional women who are less pit bullish than some of the male colleagues.

———————–

**Title borrowed  from a certain TV commentator whose name I am reluctant to mention ever since he declared Katie Curic a day’s worst person in the world for saying the coverage of Clinton was sexist.

What’s Missing? June 5, 2009

Reader Amy has alerted us to a new Oxford venture, Oxford Bibliographies Online: Philosophy. Here’s the Editorial Board:

Prof. Robert Audi (Notre Dame)
Prof. Quassim Cassam (Cambridge/Warwick)
Prof. Tim Crane (Cambridge)
Prof. Pascal Engel (Geneva)
Prof. Martin Kusch (Cambridge/Vienna)
Prof. Jon Kvanvig (Baylor)
Prof. Peter Lamarque (York)
Prof. Brian Leiter (Chicago)
Prof. Adrian Moore (Oxford)
Prof. Wlodek Rabinowicz (Lund)
Prof. Ernest Sosa (Rutgers)

Since the topic of the series is *Philosophy*, there really isn’t much room for the thought that there just weren’t any appropriate women in the field. Apparently they’ll be adding some more editors, so I’m going to gently suggest the addition of some women, as well as inviting the editor to comment on this post. I suspect that what we’re seeing is the v. powerful influence of unconscious bias and stereotype effects. Women just *aren’t coming to mind* when they try to think of top philosophers. But every time this happens, that effect is reinforced. To fight it, we really have to get more women onto these boards.

The list comes from the first comment on this post.

Abortion providers – violence and harassment June 5, 2009

Here’s an article from Salon, which talks about the violence and harassment faced by abortion providers, and the lack of protection they receive.

Sotomayor and the media June 4, 2009

OK, I know it is not a surprise to say that the media is employing sexist and racist stereotypes in its portrayal of Sotomayor and that those stereotypes place her in an infamous catch-22–  How dare she be smart and aggressive?  Wait, she’s a lawyer and a judge.

But,  if anyone is doing research or teaching about this topic,  here is site that does an excellent job documenting and linking to a long list of examples in the US media, and connecting them to legal scholarship about racism and sexism.

Maybe all the marking is making me lose my mind June 4, 2009

but I really want these shoes. (Thanks, Mr Jender.)

So Summers was simply wrong. June 3, 2009

Larry Summers, when president of Harvard, conjectured that women  are simply innately inferior to men at science and math.  His comment, quickly identified as the sort of thing that helps impede women’s advancement, nonetheless revealed a widely-spread belief that men and women’s biological differences underlay differences in achievement in science and math.

A knowledge of the complex conditions for gene expression probably should discourage us from approaching problems  in any simple terms about nature versus nurture.  However,  sometimes there are simple and clarifying moments when nurture changes enough that we can see what the contribution of nature is.  And in science and math it  is turning out to be zero.

The NY Times reports the findings of a panel of the National Research Council:

In recent years “men and women faculty in science, engineering and mathematics have enjoyed comparable opportunities,” the panel said in its report, released on Tuesday. It found that women who apply for university jobs and, once they have them, for promotion and tenure, are at least as likely to succeed as men.

And mathematics?

In another report this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the University of Wisconsin reviewed a variety of studies and concluded that the achievement gap between boys and girls in mathematics performance had narrowed to the vanishing point.

There are still more boy math prodigies than girl, but the gap is narrowing here too.

The NRC  reports a remaining problem:

But compared with their numbers among new Ph.D.’s, women are still underrepresented in applicant pools, a puzzle that offers an opportunity for further research, the panel said.The panel said one factor outshined all others in encouraging women to apply for jobs: having women on the committees appointed to fill them.

Perhaps the reflections of Female Science Professor could offer a clue to the problems:

When I was a postdoc, I was just happy to get through a day without being groped (by an emeritus professor), excluded from using the research facilities I needed (by technical staff), yelled at (by office staff), unnerved (by a large male grad student who frequently expressed the opinion that ‘girls like to be hit’), insulted (by one of a wide range of people), or the target of a scary lab prank (by one particular technician).

Such is not, it is  important to  note, the  typical male postdoc experience, my resident expert tells me.

Perhaps silly for a moment, but …: Addition June 2, 2009

So the cats got into the book shelves and distributed quite a few books on the floor.  Not, I hasten to say, slowly and one by one.  Rather, there was quite a crash a while ago.

As I put them (the books) back in a decidedly untidy pile, I once again wondered what it would be like to see such a pile as wrong, a failure to create the necessary order.  Now, I can see that a whole bookcase of sprawling piles of books is not  what one would want, but done piecemeal, mess has always seemed to me to have much to say for it.

You may realize that I am describing what  certainly could be a distracting conflict – a desire for order coupled with a robust disinclination to take the necessary individual steps to achieve it..  (We – partner and I –  have quite an appearance of order, as long as one stays away from the closets and drawers.  And he does put things away, which is a source of another kind of problem.)   So what to do about this?  Unfortunately, the desire for order seems to increase as one grows older.  At least in some people, including me.

Well, there is now web help.  And the site is interesting, despite its being probably quite traditional in its values.  I don’t exactly know this, but it starts out telling one to get the kitchen sink shining clean and restore it to that state each day.  This does not sound to me at all like advice aimed at the average untidy man, though I might be wrong, of course.  It goes on to describe how to get one’s children to help (or at least not obstruct), so it seems even more likely to be targeting the principal carer for the children.  And we all know who we are.  It also offers daily email stuff, and while I imagine that’s not exactly out of the 1950′s, feminist phils might find it tedious.

Still, what is does have andwhat is so interesting is an idea of what you need to do to change direction in your life.  And whoever has done it has done some heavy thinking about how restoring order to one’s environment may depend on gaining a sense of self discipline first.  The advice about the  sink is followed next with #2:  getting up and getting dressed!  Right away in the morning, that is; not before noon or anything easy.

The process of getting control of one’s environment and introducing order into it is obviously a long one, and there are weeks of advice, along with tons of email, blogs and so on.  And a wonderfully spare web store.

There are lots of ways to change, I suppose.  One is getting hands-on professional help; another might be getting together with friends.  And perhaps some people can really just change directions, on a dime.  But if you are going it alone, this site has, I would be, a realistic estimate of what most of us would be in for.  And that’s why we don’t quite make it too often.

Furthermore, if it takes this much systematic effort to change a fairly willing self, imagine what it is like to change an unwilling other person.  Arrggghhh.

And we here at this site can take on trying to change a profession!  Arrrggghhh x 100.

The site is:  www.flylady.net

Let us know what you think.

Addition:  do note the serious praise the site gets in some of the comments!  You too might find it useful.