Back in December 2013, a PR consultant stopped before boarding a plane to tweet at her 170 followers. “Going to Africa,” she wrote, “Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding, I’m white!” When Justine Saccro got off the plane 11 hours later, she had no idea that her life had totally changed. Her tweet went viral, as tens of thousands of people expressed their outrage and demanded (basically) her head. She immediately lost her job and served her 15 minutes as the most hated person […]
She Blinded Me with Science
I’m very interested in exposing the ways that women are discouraged from taking an interest in STEM fields, so Eileen Pollack’s The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club was an automatic add to my to-read list. While it wasn’t quite what I expected, it’s still a valuable resource for women like me who loved science and math but were discouraged from pursuing those subjects and, perhaps more importantly, for teachers and scientists who may not realize that their unconscious behaviors […]
Biological imperative, my ass
Delusions of Gender is a truly interesting study of the (mostly flawed) studies in neurological science intended to explain gender differences between men and women that originate in the brain. It got a lot of press when it first came out a few years ago, and deservedly so — with nearly 100 out of 340 pages dedicated to footnotes and the bibliography, it’s impressively researched and satisfyingly comprehensive. Cordelia Fine’s main argument, after definitively surveying the field, is that neurological claims to identify and explain […]