Women of Science

I just listened to a podcast this morning from Astronomy Cast on Women in Science.  I thought it was going to be talking about all the amazing women of science, but instead it was about the untold story about what happens in science and in astronomy in particular, to women.

Anyone that has read my blogs for a while knows that there are some themes that I like to talk about and a few that I don't like to talk about but do anyways. I don't like to talk about the repressing of a gender by another, obviously this is men repressing women and not the other way around.  There has been a lot of talk over the last couple decades of getting women into science and it seems like men in science want women in science so they can abuse them.  I don't think that is a fair statement, but I think it is a true statement.  

The host of the Podcast talked about how bad it is for women.  She told listeners about the things that happened to her in her career and she downplayed them, because she had heard stories from other women who had suffered from worse than she.  She talked about senior members of academia making it clear that advancement in their profession depended on pleasing them sexually and failure resulted in dismissal.  There was discussion on what it was like to be at a bar at a conference and have your colleagues grope you and then have to work with them in the future.   She talked about how fellow women made strong suggestions as to which of the male supervisors she should work with and which ones she should never be alone with.

She talked about how e universities are condoning this behaviour by settling complaints with non disclosure agreements which prevent the victim from telling other women and anyone else about their experiences, while the perpetrator remains uncensured and free to offend again.  

Women compose half the population of the world and they are as intelligent as men.  They think differently then men and so they approach problems differently then men and have different results.  Men are not inherently better than women, they are just different.  Science needs to have both perspectives for it to advance smoothly and the field needs to be level and allow either sex to advance as far as they can.  To that end, men cannot be allowed to repress women, in or out of science.