Everything Old Is New Again: ZOMFG!!! Ads Influence Our Media!

By now, perhaps, you are aware of the uproar about the ScienceBlogs corner of the bloggysphere. PepsiCo has bought started a blog here, called Food Frontiers. Many are unhappy, bloggers and commenters alike. Read PalMD’s take, and commenters there, for one perspective.

One of the potential disadvantages [of a blog network] is advertising and sponsorship. Here at Sb, we’ve been very fortunate in that our content is completely independent. We control anything in the center column. The top and right however belong to Sb, and they use this space to keep the place running. There have been several times when the advertising has been less-than-appropriate, and SEED has responded by altering it, but in this economy, it pays to be flexible. Ad content can serve as blog fodder. There’s nothing preventing those of us who blog here from critiquing the ad content as vigorously as we wish to…PepsiCo’s PR flacks basically own a the center column content on one of our blogs. This is not only a fundamental conflict of interest, it’s also deceptive. If PepsiCo is providing the content, it should, in my opinion, be clearly labelled as advertising.

The only way to be free of any corporate influence over content is to be 100% ad-free, as Ms Magazine so candidly revealed to us at the beginning of the 1990′s in Gloria Steinem’s famous editorial, “Sex, Lies, & Advertising“, with this stunner of an opener:

Things Are Getting Better All The Time…

Female Science Professor has posted a checklist – “Kind of like Sexism Bingo, but in list form.” – and asked for additions.
I was going to offer a few additions, but I thought “all that crap happened a thousand years ago, when I was an undergrad/grad student. I’ll just read this list of new stuff to see what teh wimminz are whining about these days.” Because things are getting better all the time.
Alyssa at 6/17/2010 10:03:00 AM said:

Someone asks why you bothered getting a PhD if you’re “just going to have children”

and DRo at 6/17/2010 10:36:00 AM said:

You are told that you won’t be interested in a TT position once you have children.

Time machine, take us to…..1984! Hello, classmate! Hello, undergrad thesis advisor!
Anonymous at 6/17/2010 12:16:00 PM said:

Someone tells you not to talk about women or minority in science issues because it makes people think you are not committed to science.

Time machine, take us to…1988! Hello, thesis committee member! (And major thanks to all of you for that 4.5 hour prelim, in complete violation of university policy, while I’m back here visiting!)
Anonymous at 6/17/2010 12:40:00 PM said:

** When you are in YOUR OWN office, visitors assume you are an administrative assistant **
and then, when you point out that you are not the admin, are told “Oh, you must be the student worker, then!”

Time machine, take us to…1999! Hello, various random d00dches!
Anonymous at 6/17/2010 03:12:00 PM said:

One of my personal favorites from my graduate school was a comment by a faculty member meant as a compliment, at a reception, “Surely, you’re not a physicist”. “Surely, I am” I said.

Time machine, take us to…the entire decade of the 1980′s! Hello, every pickup artist and sad sack conference fuckwit who thought “you’re too pretty to be an engineer!” was a great come-on line.
Rachael Shadoan at 6/18/2010 06:58:00 AM said:

I feel that the more we focus on this kind of thing, the more discouraging it is for young women trying to join the field.

and at 6/18/2010 10:02:00 AM

Instead of long lists of how we’re under-appreciated and gender-stereotyped and in general discriminated against, I would like to see lists of creative, professional, appropriate ways to handle some of these situations.
Then, it’s less depressing because it provides the tools to handle this sort of thing. Over time (presumably), if we all use the tools to address these issues, they will decrease in number and severity.

Time machine, take us to…1989! Hello, contentious discussion at AWIS meeting where I was invited to speak about gender and science!
On second thought, time machine, never mind.

Does “English-Only” Make Your Lab A Safer Place?

Prodigal Academic comments over at Isis’s place:

Everyone speaking English is no guarantee of safety.
That is true, but since the lab was in the US, everyone in it is supposed to have a minimal proficiency in English. In practice, the net result was that the standard procedure was to use English first (allowing others to maintain a good awareness of what was going on around them in the lab), then confirm understanding in another language if necessary.
As a purely safety consideration, it makes a lot of sense to have a lab language. My group right now has 2 PhD students and 3 undergrads, all of whom speak decent to fluent English, and none of whom share another language in common. As it happens in my own lab, I don’t actually care what language people use as long as everyone understands any hazardous conditions that may be present. If I see this not happening as the group grows, I may implement a similar English while setting up experiments rule.

When I began my PhD program, I had never set foot in a tissue culture lab before. I was an engineer, with a wee bit of chemistry experience from my M.S. But if you are intent on growing living cells, you are going to have to autoclave things. Or so I had come to understand.
I was a native English speaker, and so was everyone else in my lab. So, indeed, was everyone else that I interacted with regarding the use of the autoclave. Here’s the extend of the instructions I got about using the autoclave:
“The autoclave is down the hall in room X. Put your stuff in this bin. For glassware you probably want to run it at such-and-so conditions. For liquids you probably want to run it at such-and-so conditions. Don’t forget to put autoclave tape on your stuff so you know after what’s been through the autoclave.”
Everyone spoke English. Yay! But I am pretty sure I ruined some stuff for people, not to mention narrowly missed killing myself, before I finally haphazardly learned how to operate the autoclave.
Thoughts?

Wah Wah, Where Is The Stuff For White Men?

A recent conversation with a friend reminded me of yet another of the “death by a thousand paper cuts**” craptastic things I used to hate dealing with in my days in the scientific workforce. You know what I’m talking about. Could be a retreat, a workshop, a seminar, a meeting, a program, maybe even just a discussion, but whatever it is, diversity is the subject, explicit or implicit. On one occasion it was a discussion about whether a tiny little space should be set aside for students of a certain group. On another it was a pizza party for women students. But ever and anon, at such occasions, you will hear the plaintive wail:
“Where is the [meeting/retreat/study room/pizza party/program] for white men?”
At K-State, where I was for a time director of the Women in Engineering and Science Program, I was asked not once but several times “Where is the program for men in engineering?” I had various answers. Sometimes, when I felt pissy, I would say, “That would be the whole College of Engineering.” Sometimes when I felt polemical, I would say, “You know, that’s a good question. It’s good for us to think about why we need a program for women in engineering. Women can do engineering work, but engineering is not as successful in attracting and keeping them as it is with men. So in a sense, the program is more for the college of engineering than it is for the women.” Sometimes, when I felt Socratic, I would say, “That’s a good question. What do you think men need that they aren’t getting, that a men in engineering program would provide?”
But all times, this is what I really wanted to say:
Jesus H. Christ! Every time I hear that “where is the whateverthefuck for white men” I want to say “seriously? Seriously? you think you are the first motherfucking white d00d in the whole motherfucking world to come up with that acid riposte in a diversity-related seminar/meeting/retreat/discussion? SERIOUSLY? Go away and come up with an ORIGINAL white d00d whine and we will think about giving you a diversity cookie. Until then, open up your motherfucking white d00d eyes and take a look around at how the whole entire world is plastered with signs that say ‘White D00ds ‘Specially Welcome Here!’ ‘K? Thx.”
**(The) Knight Higher Education Collaborative (September 2001). Gender Intelligence. Policy Perspectives, 10(2), 1-9.

Maternal Sentimentality and “The Box”

Not that it matters much with this dreadful film, but if you’re worried about spoilers, don’t read this post till you’ve seen the movie. You’ve been warned. Proceed past the jump at your own risk. Movie trailer can be found here.

Maybe This Is Why God Created Comix

By which I mean, this.
The comix being, as it were, a bit of solace for Him leaving us to wander about this hideous world choked by gender smog.
MAJOR hat tip to Pat at Fairer Science.
UPDATE: And for more turning-the-tables fun and shenannigans, be sure to read Peggy’s post on The Sultana’s Dream over at Women in Science.

But What If You Can’t Afford To Stay Home?

What’s a good citizen to do if he or she thinks that cough and sneeze is swine flu? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends:

Stay home if you get sick. CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.

This afternoon I’ve been reading Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich – which is ever so more relevant now, if that were possible, than when it was originally released. Near the end she notes:

It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition – austere, perhaps, but they get by somehow, don’t they? They are “always with us.” What is harder for the nonpoor to see is poverty as acute distress: The lunch that consists of Doritos or hot dog rolls, leading to faintness before the end of the shift. The “home” that is also a car or a van. The illness or injury that must be “worked through” with gritted teeth, because there’s no sick pay or health insurance and the loss of one day’s pay will mean no groceries for the next. These experiences are not part of a sustainable lifestyle, even a lifestyle of chronic deprivation and relentless low-level punishment. They are, by almost any standard of subsistence, emergency situations. And that is how we should see the poverty of so many millions of low-wage Americans – as a state of emergency.

One simply can’t choose to stay home from work under those conditions. In an Afterword written in late 2007, Ehrenreich writes that an Economic Policy Institute report found

an astounding 29 percent of American families living in what could be more reasonably defined as poverty [as compared to the more stringent federal poverty line definition]. At least this was the percentage of families earning less than a bare-bones budget covering housing, child-care, health care, food, transportation, and taxes – though not, it should be noted, any entertainment, meals out, cable TV, Internet service, vacations, or holiday gifts. Twenty-nine percent is a minority, but not a reassuringly small one, and other studies have since come up with similar figures.

Can we reasonably expect people living in such conditions to stay home from work while sick – plus two days after symptoms have subsided, as I heard recommended for students at the University of Delaware – when they have no sick pay, no resources to fall back on, and in some cases, not even any real home to stay in while away from work? In some cases, as Ehrenreich observes in her book, work may be the source of one of their free or deeply subsidized meals.
I do not think this bodes well for us as a nation in dealing with a potential pandemic.
Just one more reason why the strategy of short-term gains in the bottom line from keeping workers’ wages and benefits down is not a viable long-term strategy for a healthy economy or society.

Even Their McDonald’s Is Nicer

McDonald’s is everywhere, of course. But it’s not completely cookie cutter; only about 99.9% so. For example, the McDonald’s at the Heidelberg train station I used to frequent when I felt unbearably homesick in Germany had beer on tap – something you don’t see in the U.S! Most McDonald’s I’ve ever been in, though, feature incredibly dispiriting physical environments. You aren’t really encouraged to linger and enjoy yourself. It’s fast food, after all. It’s not like it’s your quaint neighborhood Starbucks.
But as we knew all along, the very rich are different from you and I, and so is their McDonald’s decor. I drove down to Philly’s Main Line area today for a garden tour of Carolyn’s Shade Gardens. (So incredibly beautiful. Two boxes full of lovely native plants climbed in the car and came home with me…) I was feeling migrainey and stopped at a McDonad’s on Lancaster Avenue for some orange juice. This is very much not how the McDonald’s in my neighborhood looks.

It’s amazing what a different environmental feel the (fake) flower vases on the table and framed art shots on the walls give to virtually the same soulless furniture. In the end, though, it’s still the same crappy food.

Please Don’t Disturb My Complacency!

Sooooo….it appears some of you take your comics quite seriously. At least, should one be so foolish as to point out painfully obvious, boringly everyday occurrences of sexism.
Danimal asks of Comrade Physioprof: “So you are saying the comic reflects real life?”
What Physioprof said is this: “Every single one of the Foxtrots themselves represents absolute conformity to patriarchal gender norms. And the characters who are not part of the family who appear to violate those norms serve the patriarchal narrative purely as foils.”
Inasmuch as patriarchal gender norms represent Real Life^TM, or what you experience as real life, then to that extent the comic would represent real life.
The comic represents patriarchal gender norms. The particular comic I singled out represents a particular patriarchal gender norm, that girls are not good at math. This is so boringly obvious it’s almost unworthy of comment. I commented on it to point out exactly how dozens, hundreds, thousands of tiny shitty little bits like this comprise the gender smog we breathe daily. The comic strip on its own is barely worthy of notice. Who cares what Bill Amend thinks about women and math? His kids gotta eat, maybe he isn’t capable of actual humor like Stephen Pastis or Wiley Miller, sexism sells. The only thing interesting about it is how it functions as a particulate in the larger gender smog.
What’s just as interesting, however, is when you point something like this out, and you see the reaction. People falling all over themselves to insist no, no, no there’s nothing at all sexist going on here, nosiree, it’s just THE WAY THINGS ARE!!!!! In REAL LIFE^TM!!!!!!

Please Don’t Disturb My Complacency!

Sooooo….it appears some of you take your comics quite seriously. At least, should one be so foolish as to point out painfully obvious, boringly everyday occurrences of sexism.
Danimal asks of Comrade Physioprof: “So you are saying the comic reflects real life?”
What Physioprof said is this: “Every single one of the Foxtrots themselves represents absolute conformity to patriarchal gender norms. And the characters who are not part of the family who appear to violate those norms serve the patriarchal narrative purely as foils.”
Inasmuch as patriarchal gender norms represent Real Life^TM, or what you experience as real life, then to that extent the comic would represent real life.
The comic represents patriarchal gender norms. The particular comic I singled out represents a particular patriarchal gender norm, that girls are not good at math. This is so boringly obvious it’s almost unworthy of comment. I commented on it to point out exactly how dozens, hundreds, thousands of tiny shitty little bits like this comprise the gender smog we breathe daily. The comic strip on its own is barely worthy of notice. Who cares what Bill Amend thinks about women and math? His kids gotta eat, maybe he isn’t capable of actual humor like Stephen Pastis or Wiley Miller, sexism sells. The only thing interesting about it is how it functions as a particulate in the larger gender smog.
What’s just as interesting, however, is when you point something like this out, and you see the reaction. People falling all over themselves to insist no, no, no there’s nothing at all sexist going on here, nosiree, it’s just THE WAY THINGS ARE!!!!! In REAL LIFE^TM!!!!!!