SESPA attended its first meeting of the American Chemical Society this year. The immediate reaction of the lower echelon officials was of hostility. Denied the right even to put up a literature table, some of us circulated among the arriving chemists armed with leaflets and other "subversive" goodies, while others...
Tag - sexism
In a country where over one half of the population are women, why are only 9% of chemists women? Why do women constitute only 4.2% of all physicists and 0.8% of all engineers? Are we dealing here with those mythical natural interests and capabilities of women? Is the reason irrational discrimination, or is it perhaps...
One of the films that Steve gave me was called "Pregnancy testing in the 70's". It was a panel discussion between six members of the medical profession. The trend of the discussion was how important routine early pregnancy tests are, since women could go into X-ray therapy, for instance, unaware of their pregnancy...
The oppressive set of myths that make up a large part of this ideology can survive only so long as women remain ignorant of their physiology, of the commonness of their psychological suffering, and of the role that the ideology itself plays in influencing them to accept their oppression (indeed in often preventing...
It was Shirley Chisholm, the black American Congresswoman, who said recently that she had faced discrimination all her life-but that she had suffered more as a woman, than as a Black. Under the regime of Apartheid, it would not be possible for any black South African woman to say the same; in this society, colour...
Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose wiil inevitably structure itself in some fashion. The structure may be flexible; it may vary over time; it may evenly or unevenly...
When the Boston campus of the University of Massachusetts opened in the Fall of 1965, its initial physics faculty was made up of two men and two women, and one of the men was married to one of the women. At the start of her fourth year the wife (of the couple) got notice that "University policy quite clearly prohibits...
It is important to note that sexual oppression is both pervasive and institutionalized; within the scientific community it takes many forms. Educational tracking by sex from elementary school on channels women into subordinate roles and stereotypes. While men are trained to develop 'logical' patterns of thought, women...