Posts tagged sexism
Posts tagged sexism
Sake making has a history of more than a thousand years, with strong roots in Japan’s traditional Shinto religion.
But when the liquor began to be mass produced during the Edo period, from 1603 until 1868, an unspoken rule barred women from breweries.
The reasons behind the ban remain obscure. One theory is that women were considered impure because of menstruation and were therefore excluded from sacred spaces, said Yasuyuki Kishi, vice director of the Sakeology Center at Niigata University.
“Another theory is that as sake became mass produced, a lot of heavy labor and dangerous tasks were involved,” he said. “So the job was seen as inappropriate for women.”
Posting this because “Sakeology Center” had me crying
A day after the publication of a New York Times interview in which Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner said that Black and female musicians “didn’t articulate at the level” of the white musicians featured in his new book of interviews, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced that he has been removed from its board of directors.
…
“It’s not that they’re not creative geniuses. It’s not that they’re inarticulate, although, go have a deep conversation with Grace Slick or Janis Joplin. Please, be my guest. You know, Joni [Mitchell] was not a philosopher of rock ‘n’ roll. She didn’t, in my mind, meet that test. Not by her work, not by other interviews she did. The people I interviewed were the kind of philosophers of rock,” Wenner said. “Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right? I suppose when you use a word as broad as 'masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.”
Imagine saying this out loud to a person who’s recording what you’re saying for the express purpose of publishing it later and being like “yeah, this is a great idea”
Nick Perry with a long report for the AP:
Monahon, 35, is one of many women who say the isolated environment and macho culture at the United States research center in Antarctica have allowed sexual harassment and assault to flourish.
The National Science Foundation, the federal agency that oversees the U.S. Antarctic Program, published a report in 2022 in which 59% of women said they’d experienced harassment or assault while on the ice, and 72% of women said such behavior was a problem in Antarctica.
But the problem goes beyond the harassment, The Associated Press found. In reviewing court records and internal communications, and in interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees, the AP uncovered a pattern of women who said their claims of harassment or assault were minimized by their employers, often leading to them or others being put in further danger.
In one case, a woman who reported a colleague had groped her was made to work alongside him again. In another, a woman who told her employer she was sexually assaulted was later fired. Another woman said that bosses at the base downgraded her allegations from rape to harassment.
Seems not good? Fairly not good.
News release by Shannon Roddel for the University of Notre Dame:
“A perfect storm: Customer sexual harassment as a joint function of financial dependence and emotional labor” was recently published in the Journal of Applied Psychology from Timothy Kundro, assistant professor of management and organization at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.
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Previous research has looked at the idea that customers can engage in sexual harassment. But this study is the first to examine why sexual harassment is so pervasive in the service industry itself. It’s also the first to empirically link tipping to sexual harassment.
“Service employee dependence on tips and requirements for friendly displays lead customers to experience a heightened sense of power — which can lead them to engage in sexual harassment,” said Kundro, whose research examines when and why employees engage in dysfunctional behavior, specifically looking at ethics, discrimination and impression management. “We show it’s really the joint effects of customer tipping and requirements for positive gestures that drive sexual harassment. When either isn’t present, customers don’t feel the same sense of power.”
An appealing explanation, certainly
Alisson Clark in a University of Florida news release:
A college class had two teaching assistants: one male and one female. At the end of the semester, the students scored the male TA higher on course evaluations, while the female TA got five times as many negative reviews.
There’s just one problem: They were the same person.
Emily Khazan, a graduate student in interdisciplinary ecology at the University of Florida, conducted the study in a 136-person asynchronous online class last fall. Half of the students were told they had a male TA, the rest a female TA, but Khazan actually fulfilled TA duties for the whole class, using text-based interactions in an online learning platform.
Yeah, that checks out
Franklyn Cater for NPR:
The World Cup champion U.S. women’s soccer team is vowing to fight on after a judge dismissed key parts of their lawsuit seeking compensation equal to that of their male counterparts.
Federal Judge R. Gary Klausner rejected the women’s team’s argument over receiving lower pay than the U.S. men’s team. He also dismissed a claim of unequal working conditions related to the number of turf and real grass pitches. While the judge did allow other claims in the lawsuit to move forward to trial, for the women who won the hearts of the nation with a romp to the World Cup title last year, the ruling is a major blow.
Dang
Kara Fox, CNN:
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) has returned an award for a women’s sex toy, four months after it was revoked in a move that drew accusations of gender bias.
In January, the Lora DiCarlo Osé personal massager, marketed as a hands-free vibrator for “the holy grail of orgasms,” was named as an Innovation Awards Honoree in the show’s Robotics and Drone product category.
But shortly after, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which operates the conference, stripped Lora DiCarlo of the award, saying that “entries deemed by CTA in their sole discretion to be immoral, obscene, indecent, profane or not in keeping with CTA’s image will be disqualified.” It also banned the company from exhibiting at future shows.
Took long enough
Lise Eliot in Nature with a review of Gina Rippon’s book The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters The Myth Of The Female Brain:
The history of sex-difference research is rife with innumeracy, misinterpretation, publication bias, weak statistical power, inadequate controls and worse. Rippon, a leading voice against the bad neuroscience of sex differences, uncovers so many examples in this ambitious book that she uses a whack-a-mole metaphor to evoke the eternal cycle. A brain study purports to discover a difference between men and women; it is publicized as, ‘At last, the truth!’, taunting political correctness; other researchers expose some hyped extrapolation or fatal design flaw; and, with luck, the faulty claim fades away — until the next post hoc analysis produces another 'Aha!’ moment and the cycle repeats. As Rippon shows, this hunt for brain differences “has been vigorously pursued down the ages with all the techniques that science could muster”. And it has exploded in the past three decades, since MRI research joined the fray.
Yet, as The Gendered Brain reveals, conclusive findings about sex-linked brain differences have failed to materialize. Beyond the “missing five ounces” of female brain — gloated about since the nineteenth century — modern neuroscientists have identified no decisive, category-defining differences between the brains of men and women. In women’s brains, language-processing is not spread any more evenly across the hemispheres than it is in men’s, as a small 1995 Nature study proclaimed but a large 2008 meta-analysis disproved (B. A. Shaywitz et al. Nature 373, 607–609 (1995) and I. E. Sommer et al. Brain Res. 1206, 76–88; 2008). Brain size increases with body size, and certain features, such as the ratio of grey to white matter or the cross-sectional area of a nerve tract called the corpus callosum, scale slightly non-linearly with brain size. But these are differences in degree, not kind. As Rippon notes, they are not seen when we compare small-headed men to large-headed women, and have no relationship to differences in hobbies or take-home pay.
Wow, go off
Paul Rincon, BBC News:
The Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to a woman for the first time in 55 years.
Donna Strickland, from Canada, is only the third woman winner of the award, along with Marie Curie, who won in 1903, and Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who was awarded the prize in 1963.
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Drs Mourou and Strickland paved the way for the shortest and most intense laser pulses ever created. They developed a technique called Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA). It has found uses in laser therapy targeting cancer and in the millions of corrective laser eye surgeries which are performed each year.
Coupled with some asshole getting suspended from CERN for saying shitty things about women, it’s been a rough week to be a shitbag sexist in physics
The Asahi Shimbun:
Tokyo Medical University officials systemically reduced the entrance exam scores of female applicants, apparently feeling that women are not dependable enough to become doctors, sources said.
The rigging of the exam scores has continued since at least 2010 in an organized attempt to keep the ratio of female students at the university below 30 percent for any given year, they said.
Oh boy, oh boy oh boy oh boy