Ignorant physicists

[steuard]

I just received the American Physical Society's monthly newsletter, APS News. In the "Letters" section, they published a letter entitled "Nothing Wrong with Fewer Women Physicists" by someone names Jeffery Winkler from Hanford, CA. Winkler was evidently "shocked" by a February article about how encouraging women to pursue careers in physics is a

Comments

[ukelele]

("nobody thinks that's a problem" is factually wrong. says the former teacher. who knows a bunch of teachers.)

(also, frothy-mouthed rage.)

[steuard]

Having talked with a variety of nurses in the past, I'm pretty sure he's factually wrong on that score, too. More generally, I'm pretty sure that one of the defining goals of feminism is to eliminate the social pressures that perpetuate all of these imbalances. Like I said, fish in a barrel.

[zathrus]

The one nurse J responded well to during his 5-day hospital stay two years ago was the male nursing student who was brought in so he could get experience with "a noncompliant patient." I don't know whether the better response was because of the male-ness or because of the man's willingness to be taught, but the entire episode was one of the highlights of our hospital stay. I'd love to see more male nurses - both from the mother-of-male-patient perspective and from the sociological perspective that it's a rather family-friendly profession (which is why several of my female friends have pursued nursing) and I'd like to see more acceptance of men choosing their professions on that basis.

Newt

[ricevermicelli]

One thing I've noticed with Danger Lad! is that he does find male teachers, nurses, etc., pretty exciting - probably because he sees them so seldom. It's a slightly weird thing that at the age when children are becoming most aware of gender differences, we send them off into a world in which over 90% of the adults they encounter are female. It's as though the only adult male role is Dad. A better gender balance there would really help.

[ricevermicelli]

I suspect you are mistaken in a key point: I very much doubt this the person who wrote this letter is "part of the physics community," in any meaningful sense. (I'd advise you to break that Lyceum link, btw, in case of trackbacks.) His views do not necessarily represent the views of anyone in physics.

I wish I could promise you that the letter absolutely didn't represent the views of anyone in physics, but the plain fact is that there are cranks in every field of human endeavor. The fact that this guy is a crank but not a physicist does not mean that there are no cranks who ARE physicists. Somewhere in the mail and editorial offices of the APS, an error was made here, but it was (probably) an error made with good intent. "Is there anything we can do to make people read the editorial page?" In defense of the mail-opening staff, the distinction between real and crank mail can be quite subtle, and if the piles of mail are big enough, the only way to get through it in the time alotted is to fall back on a broader system of pattern

[steuard]

Link(s) broken, and what a good idea that was

[beth_leonard]

I'm wondering how your class went today, and if you have a few fewer ignorant physicists? Sometimes people just don't know how to do it.

I was pleased to read the letter a year or so back from Mudd about the steps they've taken to encourage women to study computer science, and just how effective that has been -- without watering down the curriculum at all.

A response more along the lines of "Here's how we do it at Alma, and our enrollment of women physics majors has become x% up from

[akiko]

The approach Mudd took encourages not only women to study computer science, but also the economically disadvantaged, who didn't have access to computers to fart around with when they were 7, and/or people to encourage them to fart around with computers, and/or people who knew how to fart around with computers.

It wouldn't be watering down a curriculum to include *actual* introductory courses that don't assume the students already have a decade of programming experience.