Monday, February 06, 2006

Morons in Kansas and the Science of Gender Differences A bunch of good stuff from Slate... A brief bit on the ID forces in Utah A particularly depressing story about Kansas.  I really wish Phil Kline would just shut up.  Because his brand of moronism is particularly dangerous.  Teens in Kansas, remember:  no groping.  It's a crime.    This piece doesn't focus exclusively on Kansas, but there's enough Kansas in there to make me even more depressed about the state of my previous State.  Galileo Groupies  Now the miscreant ID minions are trying to claim Galileo as their very own hero.  I wouldn't have believed it myself if I hadn't read about it.  Who would ever come up with something like this?  Those ID minions really put the "create" in creationism.  Jerks.  Leave Galileo alone, dammit! And finally, here's a piece on the new fashion of claiming boys are the gender more at risk, and all the attention to girls is totally messing up their lives.  This is a piece I wish I'd written; it so well dissects what is really going on in all this debate.  I am particularly envious of what a good job Ann Hulbert does in skewering our culture's tendency to believe that a PET scan is all you need to know about immutable gender-linked traits and abilities.  She delightfully analyzes something that has always annoyed me in the ever-more-elaborate scientific hunt for evidence of some kind of difference between the genders that can be yammered about:  no matter what the difference is, it always seems to come out better for males, even when it supposedly is something that disadvantages them - e.g., Newsweek tells us that the supposedly inefficent male brain gives rise to "kinetic, disorganized, maddening and sometimes brilliant behavior".  You'll love her comeback.  I won't spoil it - go read the piece.  It's good.      4:35:27 PM    comment [] Interpreting Studies and Headlines From the AWIS Washington Wire: Gender Does Not Restrain Students! This headline should make the journalism instructors at Ohio State University incredibly proud of the creative writing skills of the students at The Lantern, the "student voice of Ohio State University".  The quoted headline above graces a story that purports to describe how gender does not restrain students from choosing careers where they are the gender minority.  Aside from the question of why there would be gender minorities in certain disciplines if gender did NOT restrain students in choice of major, the article includes statements that contradict the headline.  Such as: [Troy] Alvarado is part of a growing number of men choosing fields with just a handful of their own gender, overwhelmed by students of the opposite sex. Again, the opposite can be said of [Jennifer] Cullen. She is part of a declining number of women once choosing fields dominated by men...[I]n the last few years, the nation has seen a decrease in the numbers of women going into engineering. The enrollment of undergraduate women in engineering has declined at OSU from 2001 to 2005, according to Glenda La Rue, director of Women in Engineering..."I don't feel weird in class at all," Cullen said. "Sometimes it's better because teachers will remember you quicker because there are so fewer girls." When we reach the day that no one talks about male nurses and female engineers - when we can stop being adjectivized versions of what is understood to be a "real" nurse or engineer - then I think we can start talking about how gender does not restrain students in choice of major.  Meanwhile, those journalism students at OSU need to retake the class that teaches them how to write meaningful headlines.  Also, maybe the one that teaches how to write a coherent story.  3:57:05 PM    comment [] Black Students Sue U. Michigan From the Chronicle of Higher Education today... ...Minority students are suing the University of Michigan.  I think this is an excellent strategy.  Why should Roger Clegg and his minions have all the fun?  If they can sue universities as a means of intimidating them into abandoning support for minority students, then I think it is entirely appropriate for the minority students to come right back at the universities and sue about the deplorable conditions under which they struggle to obtain access.  Plus, the minority students have the moral advantage of suing over an actually existing deplorable condition, rather than suing to shore up white power while saying you are color blind.  I'm thinking that Roger Clegg's brand of color blindness has resulted from being surrounded by whiteness...you know, like too much glare on snow.  3:42:46 PM    comment []

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