7 ms·

Rocket woman: How to cook curry and get a spacecraft into Mars orbit

110 points by snadahalli 8y ago

phendrenad2 8y ago
Is this headline subtly sexist..?
- danharaj 8y ago
  The subject matter is about a woman managing a high intensity career and taking care of a large family, so perhaps not. It's worth thinking about though.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  It's a headline about sexism. Sometimes, erring in the direction of political correctness interferes with speaking the truth about the world as it currently exists.
- seeyes 8y ago
  It is also a bit stereotypical to think that an engineer woman should not be interested in cooking a meal for her family or doing chores at home. In the podcast I pointed to above - Dakshayani mentions her love for cooking and interestingly compares cooking to coding.
- zem 8y ago
  just the opposite - it's highlighting the sexism she has to face, where she is expected to put in a full day's work and also do housework, including cooking for eight people.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Presumably she had some control over her fecundity? She could also, partner with someone willing to cook meals? The whole "demanding to spend your life in work, like men have traditionally had to do" and then complaining that now you've got work and family to manage is bizarre. There's only a certain amount of time -- spend it working or raising a family, you really have to choose.
    - scottlamb 8y ago
      > Presumably she had some control over her fecundity? She could also, partner with someone willing to cook meals? I wish those things could be taken for granted, but... Fecundity: Not saying this is true for her in particular, but I suspect the woman sometimes has remarkably little say in birth control (think husbands refusing to wear a condom, doctors and pharmacists refusing to supply birth control pills, etc) or even frequency of sex (from the belief that a wife is not doing her marital duties if she refuses sex, to refusing to prosecute even violent outright rape when she does). Partner: the article says her marriage was arranged (which I understand to be common), so I wouldn't assume she had much say in it at all: > A year after she began working at Isro, her parents arranged her marriage to orthopaedic surgeon Dr Manjunath Basavalingappa - which meant that she suddenly had a household to run. By the way, the article also gives a reason her husband doesn't help out with household duties (besides societal expectations that she'd do it all)... > Dr Basavalingappa explains that as a doctor, his working day often stretches up to 18 hours, while his wife mostly worked office hours. Dakshayani seems satisfied with this explanation. ...which I find insane by itself, but it's not limited to India. I just googled "medical mistakes long shift" and found a NIH study...which defined an extended-duration shift as at least 24 hours. [1] Unsurprisingly, it found that doctors screw up less when they don't do that, and talk about setting the bar low...I'd expect >12 hours to be considered extended-duration, perhaps even 8. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1705824/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1705824/
- starpilot 8y ago
  Is any mentioning of the sex of a person subtly sexist?
- iambvk 8y ago
  Not just sexist, but also demeaning - as in cooking curry is some kind of pityful/shameful thing or something.
- djfm 8y ago
  I was gonna comment the same, so thanks for getting all the downvotes :)I think it's not that sexist but at first I was shocked. Now I think it is just using way too many stereotypes in one sentence. I think they realized it was sexist but thought "but we're the BBC, they will know we don't mean it like that" (which is probably true).
madengr 8y ago
I’d think an engineer and surgeon could hire a housemaid to help out with the cooking. In the USA, it’d be a household income of > $600k. I saw a documentary a few years ago. The woman cooked breakfast, then after the husband left, immediately started lunch. Brought lunch to the husband in a stacked lunch-pail, them immediately started with dinner. They cooked all day; crazy. Of course Indian food takes a long time to make well. I don’t know how they do it in restaurants. It takes me three hours.
- skynetv2 8y ago
  I dont know why you are down voted but this is true. They should be easily able to afford a cook & a maid. Doctors earn well in India. People with less prestigious and less salary have cooks and maids. My guess is this is a narrative. I am not saying she didnt have two jobs (house work & office work), but the article paints a slightly tainted picture. It is also possible that this family did not choose to have a cook, which is also not uncommon. Especially if they are of certain cultural groups, they have strict rules on such things. regardless, you have a good point. its the choice they made and it is impressive to pull this off
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  "Could financially" doesn't necessarily mean it's socially acceptable.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - horsecaptin 8y ago
    It is socially acceptable in India to hire help for cooking and cleaning. It is much less socially acceptable in India to hire help raising the kids.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  In the USA, parents don't typically arrange an adult daughter's marriage without asking her what she thinks either. (She also was living with extended family, a thing Americans tend to not do either. In America, we default to the nuclear family. When it began with saying she was cooking for 8 people, I assumed she had many children. Not so.) Also, she liked to cook and if you are a woman and have a career, doing things like cooking is a way to bond with family. If you hire a cook, a maid and a nanny, you spend vastly less time with your children. I was a full time mom for years. I can't imagine having kids and then just hiring other people to do everything for them. If you want nothing to do with your kids, I feel like you shouldn't intentionally have kids. (Though, unlike some people, I realize that not all children are planned. So sometimes people are just coping as best they can with what life handed them.)
dominotw 8y ago
wow what a champ. love her!
seeyes 8y ago
There's an excellent podcast by Kalki - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06jv110 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06jv110. The only part that irked me was how Kalki mispronounced the lady's name. I would hope that there would be some basic research to get the name of the protagonist right.
akshayB 8y ago
Dynamics are definitely changing in India, now more women finish school & college and are becoming contributors in household income. This although is happening in major cities and metros but in rural area women are still not able to receive good education, along with this there are also several cultural challenges which are involved as well. But stories like this definitely share a hope and optimism.
- snambi 8y ago
  hmmmm.... not so true... My grand mother worked in a school... my mother worked in an university... even my wife and sister work.. I know so many women who work. All these women are not from a big city. so, let us not stereotype it.
amrrs 8y ago
A nice similar piece earlier published on backchannel https://www.buzzfeed.com/ipsitaagarwal/the-women-who-took-us-to-mars https://www.buzzfeed.com/ipsitaagarwal/the-women-who-took-us... "An image of the scientists celebrating in the mission control room went viral. Girls in India and beyond gained new heroes: the kind that wear sarees and tie flowers in their hair and send rockets into space." looked hard to find this one since backchannel moved back to wired and I didn't have free articles to read. Irony! Edit: source on BuzzFeed took me to wired right link https://www.wired.com/2017/03/these-scientists-sent-a-rocket-to-mars-for-less-than-it-cost-to-make-the-martian/ https://www.wired.com/2017/03/these-scientists-sent-a-rocket...
anonymfus 8y ago
This old soviet cartoon about exploitation of woman still stays relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkdhJWyzFR8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkdhJWyzFR8
nonamechicken 8y ago
Related: Why women in Stem may be better off working in India and Latin America: https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-professional/2015/jun/24/why-women-in-stem-may-be-better-off-working-in-india-and-latin-america#img-1 https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-professional/2015/jun/2... What India Can Teach Silicon Valley About Its Gender Problem: https://www.wired.com/2014/08/silicon-valley-sexism/ https://www.wired.com/2014/08/silicon-valley-sexism/ India and Italy have the highest percentage of female developers: https://blog.hackerrank.com/which-countries-have-the-most-skilled-female-developers/ https://blog.hackerrank.com/which-countries-have-the-most-sk...
- gowld 8y ago
  I'm not sure that it's a net win to work at more gender-balanced company in exchange for living in a far more sexist society and taking a 50-90% pay cut. Could the US take some lessons from other countries? Likely. Would women be happier moving to those countries? Less likely.
- as1mov 8y ago
  I work in the Indian tech industry (a large service based company in the past and some small-ish startups), so perhaps I can share some insights on this topic. The reason for the somewhat balanced gender ratio here is much more mundane than what these articles would make you believe. In India, engineering is one of the "default" career paths for most poor/middle class families children for leading a stable life. It's pretty depressing honestly, children spend the first 20-22 years of their life being a book-worm and they get to choose from a set of "acceptable" careers (Engineering, Medicine, Business). Any unorthodox career paths are out of question unless you are the rebellious kind. What effect does this have on the workforce? You get people (both men and women) who are barely interested in what they do. Programming/Computers doesn't mean anything to them, it's just a day job which helps them provide for themselves. This is the main differentiation between the US/European workforce and ours. It's not that women here enter the CS industry in greater numbers because of their own interest in the field, it's just that nobody gives a shit about it so the ratio is equal. This is the case with the service based companies which comprise a huge portion of the workforce. The number of women in startups (which people join on their own volition) is comparable to the US counterparts. The current company where I work, out of ~60 engineers, 4 are women. In US/Europe, you have greater freedom and choice when you consider your career, which you generally choose based on your own interests. IMO, inculcating tech/computers as a hobby at a young age in girls and dispelling the fact that it's only for "nerds" will do a lot more to equal the numbers than any affirmative action hiring ever will.
volkadav 8y ago
First parsed this headline as cooking a curry powerful enough to send a spacecraft into a Mars orbit, haha! "Wow, that's a strong curry, what do you spice with?" "... Hydrazine."
ShiroiAkuma 8y ago
for a moment I was lost thinking abt curry .... Nicely done ^_^
mcguire 8y ago
It's inappropriate, but all I can think of is the Ginger Rodgers, Fred Astaire comment: http://www.reelclassics.com/Actresses/Ginger/ginger-article2.htm http://www.reelclassics.com/Actresses/Ginger/ginger-article2...
throwaway_12323 8y ago
> It was a tough job made tougher by the responsibilities of an Indian wife. First of all, Kudos to these people! I wish India regains its old culture of respecting the knowledgeable rather than dim-witted Bollywood bimbos whose only "talent" is being born with a fair complexion. Second, what stuck out in the article was the patronizing tone of the BBC. The 'West' and its never-ending quest to look down on us 'Heathens', never fails to amuse me. I was under the assumption that this was a creation Christian 'othering', which secularized under colonial rape of India, but apparently even the Greeks thought of the Orient as being filled with exotic monsters! With Christianity, it becomes the work of devil,and thus everything in India becomes 'evil' and ruled by the goat-monster. Now everything in India is worth destroying by the enlightened 'church' of intellectuals. See, https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/the-most-dangerous-place-for-women-understanding-the-european-and-american-bias-against-india https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/the-most-dangerous-place-for-w...

110 points by snadahalli 8y ago

phendrenad2 8y ago

Is this headline subtly sexist..?

danharaj 8y ago
The subject matter is about a woman managing a high intensity career and taking care of a large family, so perhaps not. It's worth thinking about though.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
DoreenMichele 8y ago
It's a headline about sexism. Sometimes, erring in the direction of political correctness interferes with speaking the truth about the world as it currently exists.
seeyes 8y ago
It is also a bit stereotypical to think that an engineer woman should not be interested in cooking a meal for her family or doing chores at home. In the podcast I pointed to above - Dakshayani mentions her love for cooking and interestingly compares cooking to coding.
zem 8y ago
just the opposite - it's highlighting the sexism she has to face, where she is expected to put in a full day's work and also do housework, including cooking for eight people.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Presumably she had some control over her fecundity? She could also, partner with someone willing to cook meals? The whole "demanding to spend your life in work, like men have traditionally had to do" and then complaining that now you've got work and family to manage is bizarre. There's only a certain amount of time -- spend it working or raising a family, you really have to choose.
  - scottlamb 8y ago
    > Presumably she had some control over her fecundity? She could also, partner with someone willing to cook meals? I wish those things could be taken for granted, but... Fecundity: Not saying this is true for her in particular, but I suspect the woman sometimes has remarkably little say in birth control (think husbands refusing to wear a condom, doctors and pharmacists refusing to supply birth control pills, etc) or even frequency of sex (from the belief that a wife is not doing her marital duties if she refuses sex, to refusing to prosecute even violent outright rape when she does). Partner: the article says her marriage was arranged (which I understand to be common), so I wouldn't assume she had much say in it at all: > A year after she began working at Isro, her parents arranged her marriage to orthopaedic surgeon Dr Manjunath Basavalingappa - which meant that she suddenly had a household to run. By the way, the article also gives a reason her husband doesn't help out with household duties (besides societal expectations that she'd do it all)... > Dr Basavalingappa explains that as a doctor, his working day often stretches up to 18 hours, while his wife mostly worked office hours. Dakshayani seems satisfied with this explanation. ...which I find insane by itself, but it's not limited to India. I just googled "medical mistakes long shift" and found a NIH study...which defined an extended-duration shift as at least 24 hours. [1] Unsurprisingly, it found that doctors screw up less when they don't do that, and talk about setting the bar low...I'd expect >12 hours to be considered extended-duration, perhaps even 8. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1705824/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1705824/
starpilot 8y ago
Is any mentioning of the sex of a person subtly sexist?
iambvk 8y ago
Not just sexist, but also demeaning - as in cooking curry is some kind of pityful/shameful thing or something.
djfm 8y ago
I was gonna comment the same, so thanks for getting all the downvotes :)I think it's not that sexist but at first I was shocked. Now I think it is just using way too many stereotypes in one sentence. I think they realized it was sexist but thought "but we're the BBC, they will know we don't mean it like that" (which is probably true).

madengr 8y ago

I’d think an engineer and surgeon could hire a housemaid to help out with the cooking. In the USA, it’d be a household income of > $600k. I saw a documentary a few years ago. The woman cooked breakfast, then after the husband left, immediately started lunch. Brought lunch to the husband in a stacked lunch-pail, them immediately started with dinner. They cooked all day; crazy. Of course Indian food takes a long time to make well. I don’t know how they do it in restaurants. It takes me three hours.

skynetv2 8y ago
I dont know why you are down voted but this is true. They should be easily able to afford a cook & a maid. Doctors earn well in India. People with less prestigious and less salary have cooks and maids. My guess is this is a narrative. I am not saying she didnt have two jobs (house work & office work), but the article paints a slightly tainted picture. It is also possible that this family did not choose to have a cook, which is also not uncommon. Especially if they are of certain cultural groups, they have strict rules on such things. regardless, you have a good point. its the choice they made and it is impressive to pull this off
ceejayoz 8y ago
"Could financially" doesn't necessarily mean it's socially acceptable.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- horsecaptin 8y ago
  It is socially acceptable in India to hire help for cooking and cleaning. It is much less socially acceptable in India to hire help raising the kids.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
In the USA, parents don't typically arrange an adult daughter's marriage without asking her what she thinks either. (She also was living with extended family, a thing Americans tend to not do either. In America, we default to the nuclear family. When it began with saying she was cooking for 8 people, I assumed she had many children. Not so.) Also, she liked to cook and if you are a woman and have a career, doing things like cooking is a way to bond with family. If you hire a cook, a maid and a nanny, you spend vastly less time with your children. I was a full time mom for years. I can't imagine having kids and then just hiring other people to do everything for them. If you want nothing to do with your kids, I feel like you shouldn't intentionally have kids. (Though, unlike some people, I realize that not all children are planned. So sometimes people are just coping as best they can with what life handed them.)

dominotw 8y ago

wow what a champ. love her!

seeyes 8y ago

There's an excellent podcast by Kalki - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06jv110 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06jv110. The only part that irked me was how Kalki mispronounced the lady's name. I would hope that there would be some basic research to get the name of the protagonist right.

akshayB 8y ago

Dynamics are definitely changing in India, now more women finish school & college and are becoming contributors in household income. This although is happening in major cities and metros but in rural area women are still not able to receive good education, along with this there are also several cultural challenges which are involved as well. But stories like this definitely share a hope and optimism.

snambi 8y ago
hmmmm.... not so true... My grand mother worked in a school... my mother worked in an university... even my wife and sister work.. I know so many women who work. All these women are not from a big city. so, let us not stereotype it.

amrrs 8y ago

A nice similar piece earlier published on backchannel https://www.buzzfeed.com/ipsitaagarwal/the-women-who-took-us-to-mars https://www.buzzfeed.com/ipsitaagarwal/the-women-who-took-us... "An image of the scientists celebrating in the mission control room went viral. Girls in India and beyond gained new heroes: the kind that wear sarees and tie flowers in their hair and send rockets into space." looked hard to find this one since backchannel moved back to wired and I didn't have free articles to read. Irony! Edit: source on BuzzFeed took me to wired right link https://www.wired.com/2017/03/these-scientists-sent-a-rocket-to-mars-for-less-than-it-cost-to-make-the-martian/ https://www.wired.com/2017/03/these-scientists-sent-a-rocket...

anonymfus 8y ago

This old soviet cartoon about exploitation of woman still stays relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkdhJWyzFR8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkdhJWyzFR8

nonamechicken 8y ago

Related: Why women in Stem may be better off working in India and Latin America: https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-professional/2015/jun/24/why-women-in-stem-may-be-better-off-working-in-india-and-latin-america#img-1 https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-professional/2015/jun/2... What India Can Teach Silicon Valley About Its Gender Problem: https://www.wired.com/2014/08/silicon-valley-sexism/ https://www.wired.com/2014/08/silicon-valley-sexism/ India and Italy have the highest percentage of female developers: https://blog.hackerrank.com/which-countries-have-the-most-skilled-female-developers/ https://blog.hackerrank.com/which-countries-have-the-most-sk...

gowld 8y ago
I'm not sure that it's a net win to work at more gender-balanced company in exchange for living in a far more sexist society and taking a 50-90% pay cut. Could the US take some lessons from other countries? Likely. Would women be happier moving to those countries? Less likely.
as1mov 8y ago
I work in the Indian tech industry (a large service based company in the past and some small-ish startups), so perhaps I can share some insights on this topic. The reason for the somewhat balanced gender ratio here is much more mundane than what these articles would make you believe. In India, engineering is one of the "default" career paths for most poor/middle class families children for leading a stable life. It's pretty depressing honestly, children spend the first 20-22 years of their life being a book-worm and they get to choose from a set of "acceptable" careers (Engineering, Medicine, Business). Any unorthodox career paths are out of question unless you are the rebellious kind. What effect does this have on the workforce? You get people (both men and women) who are barely interested in what they do. Programming/Computers doesn't mean anything to them, it's just a day job which helps them provide for themselves. This is the main differentiation between the US/European workforce and ours. It's not that women here enter the CS industry in greater numbers because of their own interest in the field, it's just that nobody gives a shit about it so the ratio is equal. This is the case with the service based companies which comprise a huge portion of the workforce. The number of women in startups (which people join on their own volition) is comparable to the US counterparts. The current company where I work, out of ~60 engineers, 4 are women. In US/Europe, you have greater freedom and choice when you consider your career, which you generally choose based on your own interests. IMO, inculcating tech/computers as a hobby at a young age in girls and dispelling the fact that it's only for "nerds" will do a lot more to equal the numbers than any affirmative action hiring ever will.

volkadav 8y ago

First parsed this headline as cooking a curry powerful enough to send a spacecraft into a Mars orbit, haha! "Wow, that's a strong curry, what do you spice with?" "... Hydrazine."

ShiroiAkuma 8y ago

for a moment I was lost thinking abt curry .... Nicely done ^_^

mcguire 8y ago

It's inappropriate, but all I can think of is the Ginger Rodgers, Fred Astaire comment: http://www.reelclassics.com/Actresses/Ginger/ginger-article2.htm http://www.reelclassics.com/Actresses/Ginger/ginger-article2...

throwaway_12323 8y ago

> It was a tough job made tougher by the responsibilities of an Indian wife. First of all, Kudos to these people! I wish India regains its old culture of respecting the knowledgeable rather than dim-witted Bollywood bimbos whose only "talent" is being born with a fair complexion. Second, what stuck out in the article was the patronizing tone of the BBC. The 'West' and its never-ending quest to look down on us 'Heathens', never fails to amuse me. I was under the assumption that this was a creation Christian 'othering', which secularized under colonial rape of India, but apparently even the Greeks thought of the Orient as being filled with exotic monsters! With Christianity, it becomes the work of devil,and thus everything in India becomes 'evil' and ruled by the goat-monster. Now everything in India is worth destroying by the enlightened 'church' of intellectuals. See, https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/the-most-dangerous-place-for-women-understanding-the-european-and-american-bias-against-india https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/the-most-dangerous-place-for-w...