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Beautifully spoken
Fuck these misogynistic pigs, idiots like these need to be called out more often. It’s too bad she couldn’t give names out and completely humiliate and ruin them.
Normalise this. In the past women would have been accused of being unprofessional to have called men out like this. That’s the only reason why every woman doesn’t do it.
I appreciate her telling it like it is and not bowing to a pressure to please.
Found an article speaking more about it, if anyone is curious about the context/her work.
Shoutout to the physicists dismissing biologist experiment design as a whole instead of across sexual or gendered lines.
I read that as the subtext still being sexist because Biology tends to have more women in the field compared to Physics.
Nah, it’s typical university faction wars. Engineers say crap about architects, mathematicians sneer on physicists and so on…
I don’t really understand how that one was a problem if they’re also a physicist, or even if they’re a biologist. Nothing wrong with some fun rivalry.
There’s always rivalry between physicist and biologists. Or chemists and biologists. Or biologists and biologists. Damn biologists, they ruined biology!
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Fucking relatable.
No thank you to the hundreds of years of chemist men taking credit for women’s discoveries.
No thank you to the old white Persian man gate keeping chemistry from Ukranians and older women in my class.
No thank you to the sexist math book author who used shoeless women in a kitchen as a word problem example.
No thank you to Amazon for banning my 15 year account for calling the sexist math book author out in reviews.
Related:
He really didn’t coin the term for her specifically, as nice as that sounds.
Well, at least in connection with her:
Coined by English philosopher and historian of science William Whewell in March 1834 in an anonymous review of Mary Somerville’s book On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences in the Quarterly Review
I read the first sentence in that big paragraph and thought “wow, going straight to the biggest problem right out of the gate instead of building up to it, huh?” Then I kept reading and realized the entire paragraph was about that same thing. Holy shit, that’s a lot of sexism!
Acknowledgmen’t
I don’t understand the “computer girl” one, did the technician think that her being a woman meant she was doing computer science instead of physics?
If a man told you he worked with computers, it’d be odd to raise an eyebrow and respond “Are you some kind of computer boy?”. The technician treated this woman’s work as something special because she was a woman. In other words: A man that works with a computer is still just a man. A woman that works with a computer must be something special, a computer girl.
And bonus points for calling her a girl, which is just a little bit more infantilizing.
I’m not sure of the timeframe of this, but it could be referring to the time when calculations were done by women by hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Computers
could be referring to “mad men” era secretaries as ibm era computers were just better fancier word processors/typewriters
edit: or maybe like IT helpdesk staff who are like janitors (i.e. they don’t see a difference between calling environmental services for a clogged toilet vs IT for a bricked computer)
That’s still big brain though
They were paid basically minimum wage, so they weren’t treated the best. They were doing important work, and I personally have a lot of respect for it, but it was (and still is) an uphill battle against sexism.
Oh I’m sure they were treated unfairly. Just stating that I got big respect for those pioneers.
This just makes me sad. How can science advance, if we gatekeep one half of human population? In my academic career I have consistently found women to be smarter and better than men. Yet, these misogynistic ideas seem to persist. We deserve better than old farts with even older bias heading the institutions that make up our society.
It’s exactly that is why they’re kept down. Tiny men are afraid that they won’t seem as smart as the woman in the room.
As a man, I try to be different. I mentor the women around me and encourage them to do more, be better. I successfully got one of my mentee to negotiate her salary just yesterday even though she felt uncomfortable doing so. Try to be the change we need
I don’t mentor anybody. I am not smarter than anybody and frankly I am always learning from everybody, at all levels of experience.
Never claimed to be smarter than anyone, but if you’re experienced then people look up to you. A little bit of encouragement can go a long way. Like my story, all I did was nudge her to negotiate, and she felt the confidence to do so.
It cannot
Name dropping TU Delft is surprising to me! ETA: found more info here, but not about the lawsuit piece.
https://delta.tudelft.nl/en/article/a-no-thank-you-to-the-person-who-assumed-i-was-the-coffee-lady
Yeah… Not that surprising to me. TU Delft hasn’t been doing so hot. They literally have it all. Corruption, harassment, nepotism. But if you are not a PhD student you shouldn’t be too affected by any of these.
- https://www.ctol.digital/news/phd-termination-tu-delft-academic-fairness-debate/
- https://www.fnv.nl/nieuwsbericht/sectornieuws/fnv-overheid/2024/04/tu-delft-pleegt-censuur-op-eigen-universiteitsblad
- https://delta.tudelft.nl/en/article/inspectorate-of-education-ascertains-mismanagement-by-tu-delft-but-the-latter-criticises-the-investigation
- https://www.omroepwest.nl/nieuws/4830825/klokkenluider-tu-delft-maakt-levens-kapot-ik-hoop-dat-dit-eindelijk-eens-stopt
Thanks so much for these links. I haven’t had time to look into Dutch sources. I have two good female friends doing their PhDs in other universities in the Netherlands in the sciences, and I’ve never heard anything even remotely close to this! They love their positions.
I’m curious there, too.
There is an excellent Science channel on Youtube and Nebula with a Physics PHD who’s made some eye-opening content about harassment and misogyny in STEM and Academia.
I recently got recommended her channel. She’s amazing, like Jenny Nicholson but for science.
She’s a great science communicator. Another famous Youtuber (Captain D) called her “the Jenny Nicholson of science” her Dark Matter video is my favorite, though her Gell-Mann Amnesia video is a “must watch” imho.
Watch her dark matter video. And the follow up. But for the love of God, dodge the comments. SO MANY people read the title of the video and then went to make comments calling her wrong, even though she spent like an hour specifically addressing the arguments they make.
Dark matter is not a theory. It’s a problem. Fuck!
The only thing you should post in those comments is:
Dark Matter
Where is it?
How much?
Where is it?
How much?
Do we need it?
I thought it was a theory like how gravity works is a theory.
Like I said, watch her video. She goes into lots of detail and gives a much better explanation than I could ever hope to. But here I go anyway:
The gist of it is that “dark matter” isn’t really an attempt to explain anything. Like, theory of gravity, we have some good rules, things accelerate depending on mass and proximity to other things. Theory of dark matter? Not so much.
Dark matter is a problem in the sense that it’s an observable phenomenon we can’t really explain. When we observe really far away stars and galaxies, they interact in ways that imply far larger amount of matter than what we are actually observing. So where’s that matter? We don’t know! Dark matter! But unfortunately that nomenclature and the many ideas surrounding what does cause the dark matter phenomenon have deeply clouded the conversation.
Dark matter is not a theory of how things work. It’s a problem to be solved.
So it’s more we know it’s there we just don’t currently know what it is.
It isn’t theoretical much like the stink around me rn isn’t theoretical even if I cannot see or smell it with my stuffy nose because when I farted the dog barked at me and ran out of the room. I might not be able to directly observe it but clearly it is there.
Now I want an anti-acknowledgment section in my dissertation too
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Are you a woman? I’ve never met a woman who hasn’t had some experience with this. Sexism is everywhere, and if you haven’t really experienced it, that’s bcz you’re a guy.
Don’t know what the other comment was, but everyone has experienced sexism. It’s inevitable that inaccurate gender stereotypes will be applied to you at some time. For men it’s just the “stop emoting you fucking pussy” or “you suck at nurturing so don’t even try.”
The patriarchy fucks us all.
True, the patriarchy harms everyone. Sexism against women harms them (even kills) from interactions with men, negatively affects education, career, even hobbies. Leads to medical bias which also may kill them. Leads to them being trafficked and used as sex slaves. Experience female genital mutilation.
Andrew Tate is a hugely popular figure amongst young men. Those men are being harmed by the patriarchy but don’t realise or maybe care as they’re too busy harming women. It’s not the same for men, they’re massively privileged compared with women.
The patriarchy is also what sends men to die for imperialism, tells them they can’t ask for help, admit weakness, or be vulnerable. It’s why the ratio of suicides is 6:1 men to women in the US and men are something like 4 times more likely to die deaths of despair, take jobs that destroy their body, or get rejected from jobs that deal with caring or teaching because of biased assumptions of pedophilia and sexual abuse.
Yes, some (read: cis, hetero, rich) men are privileged by the system, and we should absolutely not discount women’s experiences, but it’s not one or the other, it’s both.
Oh, have you been sent to die? War duties are irrelevant for most men. The last conscription in my country was WW2 and women died then too, as nurses near the front, in the blitz, as spies, etc. All genders join the military now.
Meanwhile I think the conviction rate now, in 2025 for rape of women by men is 1%. That means you won’t get justice if you’re a woman reporting a serious crime. Women in america are dying because they can’t get healthcare for their miscarriage and pre-teen girls forced to carry their rapists baby. On shitter dickheads openly gloat ‘your body, my choice’ with no censorship, because abuse of women isn’t censored. Andrew Tate. Not really the same situation for men and women, is it? Women aren’t causing men to commit suicide but men are still controlling, belittling, abusing and killing women.
If you’re actually against the patriarchy you have to realise that it fucks women over way more and always has. We’re only seeing a backslide right now, and I suppose women in the west are lucky they aren’t in a country they would be stoned to death, or not be allowed to be overheard talking, seen inside their own home, etc.
Nobody is arguing that the patriarchy fucks men harder than women because you’re right, it doesn’t.
Your dismissal of the military issue and suicide is an example of your, and society’s, complete lack of empathy for men. Sure, it’s not women sending men to die, or directly causing them to feel hopeless, but that doesn’t somehow mean they aren’t victims of the patriarchy.
Did I personally get ordered to die? No, but I sure as hell had my role as an emotionless working machine, the assumed self-sufficient breadwinner that needed to support my entire family myself even if it meant my life was expendable, pushed on me by men, women, religion, and the media. And if I didn’t want that role or failed to live up to it, I’m a fucking loser and the community doesn’t care that I fed myself to a meat grinder and came out broken.
I promise, it’s possible to have empathy for the women who are being fucked by the patriarchy as well as the men simultaneously. Going back to my initial comment, it was never trying to disregard the scientist in the post, only dispel this idea that there is some individual that hasn’t experienced sexism/patriarchy.
I have empathy for men, in fact all genders are experiencing all of the issues you had mentioned as specific to men. I mentioned conscription because that’s something which hasn’t happened in the west in the lifetime of most men alive today. I might as well complain that women can’t vote. Why don’t you have empathy for women who can’t vote? You know why women usually don’t usually fight in war? Because men don’t just try to kill them, they use sexual violence against them. Not just the enemy but their own comrades.
I don’t know if you realise but women also wage slave and for a hell of a lot less money usually. They’re cleaners, carers, doing the dirty jobs noone else wants. Then they often go home and take care of their kids and chores -women’s work. All while getting zero respect from society. And if the man leaves for any reason, she’s a single mother and therefore worthless. If you want to learn, watch the maid. That’s a good example of a woman struggling against the patriarchy. The father of the kid in that show is struggling too and I do think he deserves empathy but I see who has it worse.
While I agree, men face sexism too, in a different way. It feels like minimizing their experiences, to have someone come in here and say, well, actually, men face sexism as well.
I am a guy, for the record. I just finally started listening to the women in my life who have been telling me for years that they face this stuff.
I don’t think it’s minimizing to acknowledge that sexism is endemic and cuts both ways.
You don’t have to think its minimizing. I’m trying to tell you nicely that it is.
