At the end of January, while ruminating the difference in behaviour between men and women on science blogs, I posted this poll asking readers to indicate their gender. In addition, I looked at all the comments on my blog of the last 5 months and looked at the number of male vs. female commenters. I closed the poll on Friday, and here are a couple of pie charts showing the results.
Some thoughts, a poll and an invitation
January 27, 2011 By
In the last week or so I’ve been reading some blog posts that were written in the aftermath of the Science Online conference that just took place in the US last week. Lots of interesting topics were covered all centred around the themes of science communication, research and the web, and the state of the blogosphere. One particular panel session has gathered a number of interesting blog posts – it was called “Perils of blogging as a woman under a real name”, led by Sheril Kirschenbaum, Anne Jefferson, Joanne Manaster, Maryn McKenna and Kathryn Clancy. You can read some good coverage here, here and here.
The panelists and participants discussed some of the problems that women face when they have a public web presence, like this one. They open themselves up to criticism that can feel gendered or sexist on their blogs, and may have their commitment to hard science questioned in their jobs. One interesting comment that all the posts discussing this panel have highlighted, is that women bloggers do less self-promotion than men.
I sometimes get requests to retweet posts, and I usually oblige – but it’s true that I’ve only ever had such requests from men. I’ve never asked anyone specifically to retweet or promote any of my posts either. Commenting is another thing: this blog doesn’t get a large number of comments on the whole, but when I checked, I found very few (single digits!) comments by women that I didn’t have some sort of strong real-life connection with already. That’s a little odd. I suppose to judge the significance of that, I should know the gender ratio of the people who actually read this blog. Can you tell me?
[polldaddy poll=4458553]
[Note: I'll keep the poll open until 10 pm on Friday 4 Feb - in case you need time to think about it.]
In which I get Celebrated in The Guardian
September 17, 2010 By
Amidst the perennial discussion of how to get more women into scientific careers and keep them there, it hadn’t occurred to me that female science bloggers may also be in a minority.
A few days ago, Jenny Rohn posted a graph on her blog, showing the male to female ratio of several science blog networks: the well-established Discover and relative newcomers The Guardian, Wired and PLoS. She didn’t actually make any statement about gender balance or proportionality of representation – that was me – but an interesting discussion followed in the comments. Self-proclaimed “armchair activist” Martin Robbins started a hashtag, kickstarted the hive overmind, and collated a list of women science bloggers over at his new perch in The Guardian.
So that’s how my name ended up in my favourite newspaper. Hurrah.
It’s a really nice initiative to get more attention to us women who write about science. Female role models have been cited as an important factor in getting and keeping more women in science careers, and in that respect increasing the visibility of working female scientists is a great idea.
And yet, and yet. I don’t think singling women out is particularly constructive way to approach a gender balance issue – a gender balance issue that, in this case, we don’t even know for sure exists.
Why so few girl engineers?
May 17, 2010 By
All quiet on the blogging front at the moment while I’m busy preparing for big upcoming meetings. But here’s some food for thought for the week…
from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Of men, women and chimpanzees
June 14, 2009 By
Dr. Smith was ectstatic he'd been shortlisted for a fellowship
Last week I listened to an excellent podcast at Slate.com on how to get more women into science. I can’t find the podcast anymore but the transcript is here, with lots of interesting links. In it, Ray Fisman reports results of a study into academic achievement in maths and science at the US Air Force Academy. The study found that replacing male instructors with a female one has a dramatic impact on the performance of the female students in the class, bringing it level with that of the men. Specifically,
women on average obtain scores that are 0.15 grade points lower (half the difference between an A and an A-) than their male classmates, even after accounting for students’ SAT scores. The gap in performance was widest for women taught by men. When a female instructor was put at the front of the classroom, nearly two-thirds of the grade point gender gap evaporated.
Bottom line: hire more women. [Read more...]
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