Tag - sexism

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...

Sociobiology: A Sexist Synthesis

During the 1960's—a time of great social unrest, questioning of basic American institutions, and a growing interest in socialism as an alternative—there appeared a spate of books on the theme that humans are only another species of ape. Konrad Lorenz, Robert Ardrey, Desmond Morris, Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox, as well...

Jungle Law: Stealing the Double Helix

What motivates scientists to do tedious experiments, chemical dishwashing, mathematical manipulations that often lead nowhere? An aura of intellectual romance shrouds the scientific world. It hides scientists’ daily routines from public view, and mystifies the reasons they choose the work they do. For most people, the...

Sexism at Cancer Lab

Three cancer researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC), Seattle, Washington, have lost their appointments at the culmination of a three-year fight with the administration of that Center. Their struggle exposes some of the basic flaws in the “war on cancer,” which currently spends about three...