Blogs / The Intersection

Last week, this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education hit my inbox from a reader named ‘Basma’. And then from ‘Jessica’ followed by ‘Cheyanne’. The link continued trickling in over the weekend… Apparently readers are aware I occasionally have something to say about gender bias in academia (and out and somewhere in the space between). My friends ’round these tangled series of tubes don’t put up with that sort of riffraff either. The piece begins like this:

As a female professor, are you called rude and abrasive while your male colleagues who make similar statements are simply labeled assertive? Has your department head discouraged you from taking an assignment, saying that because you have children you might not be able to handle it?

If things like that have happened to you, yell: “Bingo!”

The Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law is unveiling a new online game on Thursday called Gender Bias Bingo. The game is intended for women, although men who have overheard biased statements or have faced bias because they are fathers can also play.

Clicking the link led me to:

Visitors to this site are asked to choose a square and submit a representative story or quote from their experiences. The goal is to teach more of us to recognize gender bias while demonstrating the ways it can push women away from an academic career path. Director Joan C. Williams also explains the noteworthy economic angle:

“It does not make economic sense, particularly in these economic conditions, to keep recruiting women and then keep driving them out,” says Ms. Williams, who points out that a start-up package for a research scientist can cost as much as $1-million. “There had never been built, as far as I could tell, a clear explanation of why it’s cheaper to keep her.”

While it’s too early to tell how the mission of Gender Bias Bingo will play out, it’s certainly a unique new initiative. Not only does the game highlight the myriad of struggles facing women in the ivory towers, but it serves as a kind of tangible record–a visible means to display the ugly marks left across academia by such behavior. In a small way, this might reflect that gender bias is less acceptable than ever. At least, I hope so.

What do readers think?

Remember the voyage to the island of garbage in the North Pacific Gyre? It’s a unqiue collaboration between Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) and the nonprofit Project Kaisei. Known as SEAPLEX (Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition), the marine scientists on board are attempting to quantify hundreds of miles of floating plastic debris and determine the effects it may have on marine life.

I’ve just heard from Miriam Goldstein–intrepid chief scientist of SEAPLEX–about the huge SIO grad student-driven communication effort surrounding this cruise. They are working to involve the public in cutting-edge research through a website, mission blog, live Tweets from the ship, and the very cool set of Flickr project photos!

The SEAPLEX team has been featured on Science Friday, CNN, Reuters, Yahoo News, NBC San Diego, the Irish Times, and ScienceBlogs! It’s a wonderful initiative–not only because it’s intended to protect the environment and increase public understanding of oceans issues, but also in that it serves to highlight the kind of ‘New Scientists‘ we celebrate!

CM and I are following along with great interest…

Dan Vergano poses this question in the title of his USA today column.

Science enjoys the best and the worst of times today, celebrated as the secret sauce behind economic growth, but embattled in high-profile areas such as climate change, stem cells and evolution.

“Science is more essential for our prosperity, our security, our health, our environment, and our quality of life than it has ever been before,” said President Obama, in April at the National Academy of Sciences.

At the same time, Obama noted, federal funding of physics and related sciences has fallen by nearly half since the 1980’s, U.S. schools trail in math and science versus Japan, England, South Korea and others. “And we have watched as scientific integrity has been undermined and scientific research politicized in an effort to advance predetermined ideological agendas,” he said.

Vergano discusses our book Unscientific America:

They argue that the science establishment needs a new career path for science communicators (folks like Kirshenbaum, a marine scientist at Duke, who previously interned in the office of Sen. Bill Nelson, D- Fla., and who once worked as a disc jockey.)

“We’re not saying every scientist needs to become another Carl Sagan,” Kirshenbaum says. Or Comedy Central regular, astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson. But scientists need to open paths “jobs, positions, and incentives,” for their brethren to communicate the role science plays in modern life, the books argues.

He also interviewed political scientist Jon Miller who thinks more emphasis should be placed on public education:

“No one should graduate from high school without knowing what a molecule is,” he says. That’s because your odds of understanding other science concepts, for example, nanotechnology, the manipulation of materials on the molecular scale, increase greatly — from nearly zero to two-thirds — once you understand that a molecule is a chemical combination of atoms. “You can’t fix this problem without fixing public schools.”

We agree that it’s important to improve early education, however, much of the public is beyond this stage and we need to foster a culture where citizens are engaged in (and voting on) science issues now. Author Stewart Justman is quoted asking:

“Shouldn’t scientists just let the evidence speak for itself?”

I argue no. Much of the public does not have access or subscriptions to expensive journal articles and instead, people shop for information on the internet as easily as they do for Christmas presents, choosing whatever ‘science‘ best suits them. In the age of new media, absolutely not. Spend a few days walking around Capitol Hill and it will be very clear the “evidence does not speak for itself.” Furthermore, the psuedoscience out there–the folks denying climate change and more–are organized, articulate, and prepared to speak for us.

If scientists aren’t communicating more about what we do and why it matters… someone else will. And often with a different agenda.

..starts before the tribulations of a postdoc*

* The less-than-comical reality here.

* Read the less-than-comical reality here.

Over at Powell’s Books, we have contributed an original essay about the new generation of “Renaissance scientists” that we see emerging today from the world of academe. The piece opens with the story of our friend and fellow blogger Jessica Palmer–who hosts Biophemera on Scienceblogs–and goes on to discuss emerging opportunities in the sciences and beyond for the talented students now coming down the pipeline.

The article starts like this: (more…)

She’s on her second of three, and clearly, the book is prompting a lot of worthy consideration. The second post asks the question: Okay, let’s say we realign academic and other resources to focus on making scientists better communicators. What exactly are we going to get for it?

What does all this have to do with Unscientific America? The book rests pretty solidly on the premise that scientists could do a better job of communicating with the public, and that such improved communication would do much to improve the odds that scientists could persuade the public that the pursuit of science is a societal good, that scientific information ought to play an important role in informing policy decisions, and so forth. I’m willing to accept the premise that scientists could communicate with the public more frequently, more clearly, and in a way that addresses the public’s interests more directly. But I think it’s reasonable to ask how much movement we can expect in what the public values in response to such improvements in communication.

(more…)

We did a Q&A about the book here that should be of interest to some. I’m going to skip the science-religion stuff, but here are some other important parts of the exchange:

Chris pointed out here that climate change denier extraordinaire Marc Morano may be dead wrong, but he’s articulate, well funded, and there’s no one on the science side that competes with him. What specifically can be done to change that?

It’s simple: Things won’t change until the world of science invests in creating counter-Moranos. There are many talented and extremely young intelligent people in science today who could fill that role, but there is little training available for them, and even less of a career trajectory for them to get there.

(more…)

Here it is, and I think it may be the best diavlog we’ve done yet:

These are the different segments of the conversation, and we actually had some significant disagreements about the role of education in solving our problem, and other matters. I think it was a great talk:

Science Saturday: The War on Ignorance
Chris’s new book, “Unscientific America” (02:23)
Carl vs. Chris on how to fight scientific illiteracy (16:03)
A brief history of science’s image problem (09:10)
Do we need another Carl Sagan? (04:46)
If bloggers can’t make science cool again, who can? (09:17)
The culture gap between Hollywood and the scientific community (08:38)

Carl is also going to be introducing me when I give a book talk in New Haven, CT, on July 21. Details here.

It’s close to the official July 13 launch of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, and we’re continuing to preview what’s in store. As Chris already noted, he spoke to AIBS last month about the book (slides from that talk are here)–and now the full video is up on YouTube: