10 ms·

Agreed. I've noticed a pattern of attempting to mythologize as many females in STEM fields as possible while simultaneously looking for any excuse to attack ma

by hoopd 11y ago

Agreed. I've noticed a pattern of attempting to mythologize as many females in STEM fields as possible while simultaneously looking for any excuse to attack males for their sexism (or whatever else you can find.) I take this as a sign that as a culture we've decided that yes, sexism is the reason science has always been filled with guys. Alternative hypotheses are merely a product of that same sexism. I don't think it's a coincidence that the men who have most recently received the mythology treatment are disabled (Stephen Hawking), gay (Alan Turing), had severe mental health challenges (John Nash) or are black (Neil DeGrasse Tyson). I imagine next will be a transgendered hero.

innguest 11y ago
You're right, of course. It's called Cultural Marxism for those who don't yet know it.
- cdelsolar 11y ago
  What is wrong with you people?
  - hoopd 11y ago
    Feel free to contribute to the conversation. Perhaps you could familiarize yourself with parent comment's assertion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_marxism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_marxism) so you can say "Here's why I disagree with what you're saying..."
  - innguest 11y ago
    I don't understand your reply, nor do I see a reason for the downvotes. A downvote is a bashful admission of the correctness of a statement.
dalke 11y ago
It's very easy to see patterns which aren't present. We as humans are quite good at doing this. How might I confirm that this pattern is present? To start, let's look at movies that deal with "Scientists, Engineers, Doctors, Researchers, Inventors, Explorers and People who do Amazing Things", from http://www.imdb.com/list/ls050940841/ http://www.imdb.com/list/ls050940841/ . These include Apollo 13, Fat Man and Little Boy, Einstein and Eddington, Shackleton, Creation, Captain Cook: Obsession and Discovery, Gorillas in the Mist, Temple Grandin, Jobs, and Reach for the Sky. Of the 31 films (though two are not biographies or based on real-life), 2 are about women (Gorillas in the Mist, Temple Grandin), and the rest are about men. Einstein is certainly high on the list of mythologized people, so mythologization is not limited to women. (Feynman would be another. Infinity (1996) is a biopic about Feynman, but it's not on the list.) Women appears underrepresented in that list compared to their modern presence in STEM fields. To be fair, the movies include Pasteur from the 1800s, and Harrison from the 1700s. Women were often strongly restricted from doing research in STEM fields during that time. I saw one non-white person on that list, Vivien Thomas, from the 2004 film "Something the Lord Made". "Reach for the Sky" from 1956 is "The true story of airman Douglas Bader who overcame the loss of both legs in a 1931 flying accident", and Temple Grandin is autistic. However, since 1956 is rather a long time ago, it does point out the need for a baseline - if the percentage of movies about disabled people has been stable, then it's not a growing pattern. As another example of someone who 'received the mythology treatment', consider "Helen Keller in Her Story" from 1954. (Howard Hughes, in 'The Aviator' (2004), may also fall into the mentally challenged category, due to his obsessive-compulsive disorder which was present already by the 1930s. I haven't seen the film to see if it touches on his mental illness.) Films about gay people would have been restricted under the Motion Picture Production Code, so not really seen in films from the 1930s to 1968. That would make it hard to establish a long term pattern. Still, as about 2% of the US adult population (1.2 to 5.6 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite... ) identifies as LGBT, then about 2% of the films about famous people in STEM should concern someone LGBT. It should not be hard to come up with an evaluation technique, like "all biopics about people in STEM done as movies/made-for-TV movies in the US from 1970 to the present", and redo this same evaluation to see if there is a pattern. The tricky part is to normalize it. If 2% of the population is homosexual, then what percentage should we expect to see portrayed as they are in movies? If 51% of the US population are women, and 27.9 percent of the PhDs in the physical sciences are women, what patterns should we expect to see in films? Otherwise you might just be seeing the secular trend that more women are getting involved in STEM, that policies like the ADA make it easier for people with disabilities to get advanced educations, etc. How have you done the analysis to determine if the patterns you see are due to the expected shift in population distribution of people in STEM, vs. any special sort of mythologization?
- hoopd 11y ago
  If it wasn't clear when I say "I'm noticing a pattern" I'm talking about recent history, as in the last twenty years not the last hundred. I'm looking at what we're doing now, your way only tells us if the unfairness of the past 20 years is greater than or less than the 80 years before that. Instead of IMDB's list of mostly TV movies, how about Wikipedia's Films About Mathematicians[1], look at the biographical films. There are only 8, but the last film biopic of an average white dude was Feynman's back in '96. Last year alone we had major films about Turing and Hawking, and A Beautiful Mind came out in 2001. Take a look at the most recent big-budget sci-fi. Q: Who had 95% of the screentime in Gravity? A: A woman. Q: Who were the hero scientists in Interstellar? A: A black guy and two women. (How long did Doyle last? What was the race and sex of the disgraced scientist in Interstellar again?) If you would like to provide a counterpoint, simply name the regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years. We'll compare that to the efforts towards mythologizing females on HN in the past 30 days. Emmy Noether (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606497), The Women Science Forgot (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744684), and today's Ada Lovelace. We'll throw in male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year (offhand I can think of 3) and compare that to the number of disgraced female scientists (I count 0). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_mathematicians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_mathematic...
  - Joeri 11y ago
    Hollywood makes whatever sells, they don't try to be fair, and right now what sells is diversity. Why do you have to make it a bad thing? When Ryan Reynolds stops getting roles because he's a white male, then we'll have a problem. Although, maybe that's a bad example, because I might not really care why they stopped giving him roles, just as long as they did.
    - hoopd 11y ago
      I'm just pointing out what's happening. The bad thing is that we're biasing our culture in a particular direction and pretending that we're not. "Diversity selling" is the product of a massive intentional cultural shift and I'm surprised people get so upset when it's pointed out to them.
walshemj 11y ago
Actually the opposite Is true look at DNA and Discovery of Pulsars for two recentish examples from real life.
MCRed 11y ago
I can't speak for the gender ratio in "science" but I can speak for my experiences in Computer Science, which are by definition anecdotal. I'm the son of a computer programmer. My mother got her degree in this back when it had just barely become a college degree. I went to the same college in Junior High to take programming classes. I was taught by a woman. Later in High School our computer sience teacher was a woman, about %40 of the students in the classes were females. There was no perceived gender imbalance in computer science in the southern USA in the 1980s and early 1990s. In my early jobs there was a 50/50 split roughly, though women were slightly more likely to be testers than programmers, our whole team was managed by a woman. Slowly there were fewer women programmers over the years until the great programmer boom around 2000. At that point we stopped seeing "programmers" being almost always "logical hacker types with a strong interest in computers" and we started seeing people who had never written a line of code before college who decided it was a good career to go into. Those types of programmers were almost always men. I really don't have a problem mythologizing real heros-- like Alan Turing. The other three are celebrities, and you're always going to see that kind of celebrity stuff. Tyson deliberately chose to make himself a celebrity. I do lament that now "tech girls" are so often women who are not actually technical (Adrianna Richards, Shanley, FemFreak for example) who use that title for the sole purposes of pushing a political agenda and harassing people. Adrianna deserves to pay a lot of money to the men she victimized. (That political agenda, people seem to be calling cultural marxism, which is at least consistent with the marxist ideology most of them have). Like the "War on terror", so called "Feminism" has found that it makes a lot more money and lands more punches when it switches from "women are people too" to "men are rapists, you're not safe!!!1!1". The geek is stereotypically meek and socially awkward, and thus a perfect target for their abuse. Same thing with gamers. I have noticed that actually technical woman have almost zero correlations with these types. The idea that men should be ashamed because there aren't more women in programming is silly. Women aren't in programming because they've chosen not to be. In nearly 30 years working in the software business, not one of the offices I've worked with was hostile to women-- and I've worked for some real jerks-- I've never seen any of the so called rampant sexism that these people claim.
- geofft 11y ago
  > women who are not actually technical (Adrianna Richards, Shanley, FemFreak for example) [citation needed]. If you're going to call them non-technical, we need to apply that same label to people like ESR, whose biggest contribution to the community -- like Shanley -- is writing/editing books about hacker/open-source culture. Both of them happen to write code, but it's not what they're famous for.
Sideloader 11y ago
What does this have to do with the linked article?

by hoopd 11y ago

innguest 11y ago

You're right, of course. It's called Cultural Marxism for those who don't yet know it.

cdelsolar 11y ago
What is wrong with you people?
- hoopd 11y ago
  Feel free to contribute to the conversation. Perhaps you could familiarize yourself with parent comment's assertion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_marxism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_marxism) so you can say "Here's why I disagree with what you're saying..."
- innguest 11y ago
  I don't understand your reply, nor do I see a reason for the downvotes. A downvote is a bashful admission of the correctness of a statement.

dalke 11y ago

It's very easy to see patterns which aren't present. We as humans are quite good at doing this. How might I confirm that this pattern is present? To start, let's look at movies that deal with "Scientists, Engineers, Doctors, Researchers, Inventors, Explorers and People who do Amazing Things", from http://www.imdb.com/list/ls050940841/ http://www.imdb.com/list/ls050940841/ . These include Apollo 13, Fat Man and Little Boy, Einstein and Eddington, Shackleton, Creation, Captain Cook: Obsession and Discovery, Gorillas in the Mist, Temple Grandin, Jobs, and Reach for the Sky. Of the 31 films (though two are not biographies or based on real-life), 2 are about women (Gorillas in the Mist, Temple Grandin), and the rest are about men. Einstein is certainly high on the list of mythologized people, so mythologization is not limited to women. (Feynman would be another. Infinity (1996) is a biopic about Feynman, but it's not on the list.) Women appears underrepresented in that list compared to their modern presence in STEM fields. To be fair, the movies include Pasteur from the 1800s, and Harrison from the 1700s. Women were often strongly restricted from doing research in STEM fields during that time. I saw one non-white person on that list, Vivien Thomas, from the 2004 film "Something the Lord Made". "Reach for the Sky" from 1956 is "The true story of airman Douglas Bader who overcame the loss of both legs in a 1931 flying accident", and Temple Grandin is autistic. However, since 1956 is rather a long time ago, it does point out the need for a baseline - if the percentage of movies about disabled people has been stable, then it's not a growing pattern. As another example of someone who 'received the mythology treatment', consider "Helen Keller in Her Story" from 1954. (Howard Hughes, in 'The Aviator' (2004), may also fall into the mentally challenged category, due to his obsessive-compulsive disorder which was present already by the 1930s. I haven't seen the film to see if it touches on his mental illness.) Films about gay people would have been restricted under the Motion Picture Production Code, so not really seen in films from the 1930s to 1968. That would make it hard to establish a long term pattern. Still, as about 2% of the US adult population (1.2 to 5.6 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite... ) identifies as LGBT, then about 2% of the films about famous people in STEM should concern someone LGBT. It should not be hard to come up with an evaluation technique, like "all biopics about people in STEM done as movies/made-for-TV movies in the US from 1970 to the present", and redo this same evaluation to see if there is a pattern. The tricky part is to normalize it. If 2% of the population is homosexual, then what percentage should we expect to see portrayed as they are in movies? If 51% of the US population are women, and 27.9 percent of the PhDs in the physical sciences are women, what patterns should we expect to see in films? Otherwise you might just be seeing the secular trend that more women are getting involved in STEM, that policies like the ADA make it easier for people with disabilities to get advanced educations, etc. How have you done the analysis to determine if the patterns you see are due to the expected shift in population distribution of people in STEM, vs. any special sort of mythologization?

hoopd 11y ago
If it wasn't clear when I say "I'm noticing a pattern" I'm talking about recent history, as in the last twenty years not the last hundred. I'm looking at what we're doing now, your way only tells us if the unfairness of the past 20 years is greater than or less than the 80 years before that. Instead of IMDB's list of mostly TV movies, how about Wikipedia's Films About Mathematicians[1], look at the biographical films. There are only 8, but the last film biopic of an average white dude was Feynman's back in '96. Last year alone we had major films about Turing and Hawking, and A Beautiful Mind came out in 2001. Take a look at the most recent big-budget sci-fi. Q: Who had 95% of the screentime in Gravity? A: A woman. Q: Who were the hero scientists in Interstellar? A: A black guy and two women. (How long did Doyle last? What was the race and sex of the disgraced scientist in Interstellar again?) If you would like to provide a counterpoint, simply name the regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years. We'll compare that to the efforts towards mythologizing females on HN in the past 30 days. Emmy Noether (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9606497), The Women Science Forgot (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744684 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9744684), and today's Ada Lovelace. We'll throw in male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year (offhand I can think of 3) and compare that to the number of disgraced female scientists (I count 0). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_mathematicians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_mathematic...
- Joeri 11y ago
  Hollywood makes whatever sells, they don't try to be fair, and right now what sells is diversity. Why do you have to make it a bad thing? When Ryan Reynolds stops getting roles because he's a white male, then we'll have a problem. Although, maybe that's a bad example, because I might not really care why they stopped giving him roles, just as long as they did.
  - hoopd 11y ago
    I'm just pointing out what's happening. The bad thing is that we're biasing our culture in a particular direction and pretending that we're not. "Diversity selling" is the product of a massive intentional cultural shift and I'm surprised people get so upset when it's pointed out to them.

walshemj 11y ago

Actually the opposite Is true look at DNA and Discovery of Pulsars for two recentish examples from real life.

MCRed 11y ago

I can't speak for the gender ratio in "science" but I can speak for my experiences in Computer Science, which are by definition anecdotal. I'm the son of a computer programmer. My mother got her degree in this back when it had just barely become a college degree. I went to the same college in Junior High to take programming classes. I was taught by a woman. Later in High School our computer sience teacher was a woman, about %40 of the students in the classes were females. There was no perceived gender imbalance in computer science in the southern USA in the 1980s and early 1990s. In my early jobs there was a 50/50 split roughly, though women were slightly more likely to be testers than programmers, our whole team was managed by a woman. Slowly there were fewer women programmers over the years until the great programmer boom around 2000. At that point we stopped seeing "programmers" being almost always "logical hacker types with a strong interest in computers" and we started seeing people who had never written a line of code before college who decided it was a good career to go into. Those types of programmers were almost always men. I really don't have a problem mythologizing real heros-- like Alan Turing. The other three are celebrities, and you're always going to see that kind of celebrity stuff. Tyson deliberately chose to make himself a celebrity. I do lament that now "tech girls" are so often women who are not actually technical (Adrianna Richards, Shanley, FemFreak for example) who use that title for the sole purposes of pushing a political agenda and harassing people. Adrianna deserves to pay a lot of money to the men she victimized. (That political agenda, people seem to be calling cultural marxism, which is at least consistent with the marxist ideology most of them have). Like the "War on terror", so called "Feminism" has found that it makes a lot more money and lands more punches when it switches from "women are people too" to "men are rapists, you're not safe!!!1!1". The geek is stereotypically meek and socially awkward, and thus a perfect target for their abuse. Same thing with gamers. I have noticed that actually technical woman have almost zero correlations with these types. The idea that men should be ashamed because there aren't more women in programming is silly. Women aren't in programming because they've chosen not to be. In nearly 30 years working in the software business, not one of the offices I've worked with was hostile to women-- and I've worked for some real jerks-- I've never seen any of the so called rampant sexism that these people claim.

geofft 11y ago
> women who are not actually technical (Adrianna Richards, Shanley, FemFreak for example) [citation needed]. If you're going to call them non-technical, we need to apply that same label to people like ESR, whose biggest contribution to the community -- like Shanley -- is writing/editing books about hacker/open-source culture. Both of them happen to write code, but it's not what they're famous for.

Sideloader 11y ago

What does this have to do with the linked article?