(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
This post is by Phil Price. I’m posting it on Andrew’s blog without knowing exactly where he stands on this so it’s especially important for readers to note that this post is NOT BY ANDREW!
Last week a prominent scientist, representing his entire team of researchers, appeared in widely distributed television interviews wearing a shirt covered with drawings of scantily clad women with futuristic weapons (I believe the term of art is “space vixens.”) In that interview, he said about the comet that his team is studying, “she’s sexy, but she’s not easy.” Here’s a photo of the shirt (sorry about the fuzziness):
Predictably, or perhaps I should say “understandably” a lot of people were upset. One female scientist tweeted “No no women are toooootally welcome in our community, just ask the dude in this shirt.” Another wrote “I don’t care what scientists wear. But a shirt featuring women in lingerie isn’t appropriate for a broadcast if you care about women in STEM.” [STEM stands for “Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math”, and yes I use the Oxford Comma.]
The opinion piece where I first read about this has been updated since I first saw it, a few days ago, and I’m not sure exactly what has changed. I think this quote was in the original version: “This is the sort of casual misogyny that stops women from entering certain scientific fields. They see a guy like that on TV and they don’t feel welcome. They see a poster of greased up women in a colleague’s office and they know they aren’t respected.”
One thing that has changed since I first saw it is that the piece has been updated to note that the scientist has apologized. The revised piece says his “personal apology doesn’t make up for the fact that no one at ESA saw fit to stop him from representing the Space community with clothing that demeans 50 percent of the world’s population. No one asked him to take it off, because presumably they didn’t think about it. It wasn’t worth worrying about.”
A Washington Post opinion piece noted the guy’s apology and said:
none of the people calling out Taylor’s attire wanted him blacklisted from science, or punished, or to run into a corner and cry. The coolest people in the world (like the ones who land probes on comets) should also be held to the highest standards — they’re the ones that the children of the world are watching for cues.
And for young women in the world, a shirt covered in hyper-sexualized women does not send a good message, conscious or otherwise.
For every action there is an equal and and opposite reaction, so these complaints brought the reactionaries out in force. That Post piece quotes a bunch of backlash from people saying things like “When women stop looking for any reason to get offended then we can all get along sensibly” and ” how is sexy girls on his shirt objectifying woman?” But as far as I know the tweets quoted in that piece are just random nutcases on the Internet. Surely we can all agree that a shirt like that contributes to the discomfort many women feel in a male-dominated culture in which they feel disregarded and disrespected, and that he should not have worn the shirt. Right? Wrong. Even some in the mainstream media made sure they think the complaints are ridiculous. Here’s an example from USA Today: “It seems to me that if you care about women in STEM, maybe you shouldn’t want to communicate the notion that they’re so delicate that they can’t handle pictures of comic-book women. Will we stock our Mars spacecraft with fainting couches?”
I spent a couple of hours over the weekend in a Facebook discussion of this fracas — a discussion I have no desire to repeat — but I have decided this issue is too important to be left to a friend’s Facebook feed so here I am to make a few points.
- This is not a question of style. Nobody is complaining because the guy’s shirt is garish or ill-fitting or indicates a bad sense of fashion. I mention this because some of the reactionaries are saying things like “feminists have been telling us not to judge people by their clothes, and now look at this,” thereby completely missing the point. This is not about form, it’s about content.
- Some women aren’t bothered by the shirt, or by the sexually suggestive comment about the comet. I don’t think a woman has a special duty to be bothered just because she’s a woman, but I think everybody should be bothered by workplace sexism and that just because some women aren’t bothered by this example of it doesn’t mean it’s OK.
- I have friends, including female colleagues, who I’m pretty sure would not be bothered if I were to show up at happy hour or some other private function in a shirt like that. I think several would find it amusing and/or cool (I’ll be discussing this with them in the next few days). But I also think that even the ones who are perfectly OK with the shirt in private would tell me it is extremely inappropriate at work.
- I wouldn’t need to be told that a shirt like that — or a poster, or a screensaver, or anything else my colleagues might see — is extremely inappropriate at work. I have worked with enough women, and have enough female friends, to know that many of them really have been bothered by demeaning behavior in the workplace, such as sexually suggestive comments, leering, etc., that make them feel less than fully respected; this is not a made-up issue to play the victim card. If I were to wear a shirt (or have a poster or screensaver or whatever) like the one under discussion, I would contribute to that feeling of disrespect that some of them feel. I hardly believe this even needs to be said, and it’s astonishing to me that people dispute this.
- Nobody should wear a shirt like that at work, unless they are absolutely positive that nobody who sees it or knows about it will be bothered by it. If I did wear a shirt like that in a workplace setting, especially where I knew it was likely to be seen by dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people, I would expect to be fired. It is such an over-the-top violation of my workplace’s required sexual harassment training that I couldn’t possibly claim to have “unknowingly” offended people. But fear of being fired isn’t the main reason nobody should wear a shirt like this at work. Reason #4 is the reason.
- Some of the backlash against the complaints has come from people who see the scientist as a victim. They say he’s a socially inept geeky guy who didn’t mean any harm, and he apologized sincerely, and it’s wrong to publicly “shame” him. I’ve seen him described as “human detritus” left behind because he’s being “humiliated” by people whose outrage is as “phony as a three-dollar bill.” As I understand this argument — I’ve been told I seem to be incapable of understanding it, which may be true so I may have this wrong — this guy did nothing that would merit public criticism. To me this seems like a reverse version of the Emperor’s New Clothes: everyone is supposed to look at what the guy is displaying on his body in international news coverage and pretend they don’t see it. The “scientist as victim” crowd think that saying things like “a shirt featuring women in lingerie isn’t appropriate for a broadcast if you care about women in STEM,” well, that’s “shaming” the guy, and we all know how awful “shaming” is. Obviously I disagree. If you think it was wrong to wear the shirt in the workplace in front of millions of viewers you should be OK with people publicly saying it was wrong.
- I assume the scientist in question did not have the same kind of training that I am forced to take every year. Also, perhaps the attitudes in England are different. There’s reason to believe the guy really didn’t know that his shirt and his comments contribute to the perception that women are objectified in his workplace…or whatever is the right term is, if not ‘objectified’, I’m not up on the jargon. Perhaps nobody else who saw him in that shirt realized this either. The guy’s apology seemed heartfelt. I hope he doesn’t lose his job over this (a feeling echoed Rachel Feltman, the Washington Post writer linked above, who said she doesn’t want the guy punished). If this one guy were the problem, there wouldn’t actually be a problem.
- Finally, I get to my main point. I am in agreement with the people who say that the point of complaining about the shirt is not to get that ONE GUY to change his behavior, it’s to draw attention to the fact that the STEM culture as a whole still has a long way to go with regard to sexism. This guy wore the shirt without realizing it contributes to a feeling, held by many reasonable women, that STEM fields are not welcoming to them. And none of his colleagues realized that either, or if they did they didn’t say it to him. And I’ve seen online comments from people in STEM who say that women who have a problem with this sort of thing should seek therapy before trying to become scientists. It’s all kind of surreal to me. It’s a bit like watching a TV show where a white man calls a black man “boy”, or a male executive calls his secretary “cookie”, and you know the scene is set decades ago…except this is happening right now, among people my age or younger! I thought we were way past this. With the examples of calling blacks “boy” and women “cookie”, what has changed is the culture: what was acceptable to decent people back then is not acceptable now. We need to change the culture so that a decent guy in the culture will not behave this way.
I’m hoping any comments will focus on my main point, #8: how do we move the STEM workplace culture in the right direction? If, instead, you think STEM culture is just fine or that shirt is just fine in the workplace, there are other blogs where that conversation is happening right now. Or if you’d like to post about whether the reaction to the shirt is or isn’t acceptable, there are blogs where that conversation is happening. And yes, there are even conversations about the acceptability of the reaction to the reaction to the shirt! I don’t want to get involved with all of that stuff, I’ve already done a bunch of it. I also don’t want to imply that because I agree with people who say there is a problem with sexism in STEM, I agree with everything said by everyone who agrees with that.
So back to the point: how do we move the STEM workplace culture in the right direction?
I am required to take a couple of hours of “sexual harassment training” every year (the jokes write themselves, don’t they?) Most of the stuff is so obvious that the exercise always seems pointless to me..except evidently it’s not obvious because decent, intelligent guys are screwing it up really badly. And I do think they’re decent guys, in the sense that they’re not trying to offend anyone and the specific scientist in question seems really unhappy that he did so.
So, OK, there’s one idea: recommend or require sexual harassment training for people in STEM fields. It be part of graduate school training (as I experience it, it’s just two hours a year, which isn’t that bad). Another idea is to write blog posts like this one if you have a soapbox like Andrew is letting me hijack for this. What else do we have? We’re smart people. We should be able to do better than this.
This post is by Phil Price. I’m posting it on Andrew’s blog without knowing exactly where he stands on this so it’s especially important for readers to note that this post is NOT BY ANDREW!
The post Guys, we need to talk. (Houston, we have a problem). appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
Please comment on the article here: Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science
