Tag - sexism

Science and the Attack on Women: Girls, Boys and Math

Seen in this light, sex role research is most easily explained as a social and political phenomenon, not a scientific one. Once again the scientific community has come forth with an apology for the status quo (in this case, male domination), and once again, it has done so with great success. There is no deliberate...

Book Review: Overcoming Math Anxiety, by Sheila Tobias

Yet, there are some vital omissions. Notwithstanding the brave talk in the preface— "The book is mainly a discussion of how intimidation, myth, misunderstanding, and missed opportunities have affected a large proportion of the population" (p. 14)--the book settles into more of a psychological analysis of the problem...

Bottle Babies and Managed Mothers

Thus far, the movement against infant formula has mostly focused rather narrowly on the health or promotional aspects of what has come to be known as the great "bottle baby" scandal. This growing movement has already generated considerable literature on the marketing, nutritional, disease, and micro-economic issues...

Re-Examining the Anthropological Records: Old Bones Shatter Hunter Myths

Political from inception, concepts of “man the hunter” and “the killer ape” are no less political in conclusion and application. They are also dishonest, speculative and often untrue. But even if “man” (never “woman”) were a hunting animal during the dawning years of our lineage, even if this hunting lifestyle had...

Sexual Harassment: Your Body or Your Job

The scope of sexual harassment is staggering. It ranges from propositions and sexual innuendo to rape. It is just as pervasive in universities as in blue collar jobs, in police forces as in acting schools, in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as in unions The Women’s Legal Defense Fund estimates that “more...

Women Fight Back: The Politics of Female Genital Mutilation

It is intolerable that AID, whose programs are financed by tax dollars, has continued to ignore the wishes expressed by African and Middle Eastern Health Departments, and that they have refused to collaborate in international actions sponsored by WHO and UNICEF. The unwillingness of AID and other national and...

Mass Psychogenic Illness

The label mass psychogenic directs scientists to look to workers' psyches for causes and solutions, meanwhile ignoring potential physical workplace hazards and stressful conditions. It allows scientists to translate their investigative inadequacies into "respectable" jargon and lets industry off the hook. Poor...

Textbook Sexism: Sexism in College Biology

Among almost 207,500 science and engineering Ph.D.s in this country, 93.4 percent are white and 92.1 percent are male. In the biological sciences, women hold approximately 11 percent of the doctorates. This has a profound effect on science and on what we perceive as the truth about ourselves as male or female human...

Male Contraception

One of the fallacies that has permeated our minds on the topic of reproduction is the belief, conscious and unconscious, that women are the reproductive units of the species. The fertility of the male is rarely taken into consideration, as if women reproduced by themselves. We forget that we are fertile only during a...

Are Sex Roles Biologically Determined?

In the past ten years, a succession of highly publicized scientific works have purported to demonstrate that women's subordinate position in our society is due, in good part, to innate (genetic) differences between males and females, and not to external factors as claimed by the women's movement. These theories are...