The Femitist = Feminism + Scientist
This is a journal for a Women's Studies class I'm taking at SDSU in San Diego, CA. Although it is intended for the class, I appreciate any feedback or discussion.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
It’s time. (by getupaustralia)
Meanwhile in Australia.
The above shit pertains to WHITE women, says nothing of the way earnings, wealth, and power are segregated by race. Let’s make a few changes.
- Blacks, regardless of gender, earn less than whites, regardless of gender, in 100% of occupations.
- Only 11 black men ever have been president/CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Ever. Of those 11, only 6 remain in their positions. None of them have been black women.
- Regardless of education, the median wealth of single black mothers is $5. Five dollars.
- Same Degree, Same Job:
- White male: $43,500
- Black male: $32,992
- White female: $34,788
- Black female: $30,264
National Science Foundation changes workplace to boost women | Reuters
The National Science Foundation (NSF) will give researchers more workplace flexibility in a move to boost women’s role in the sciences, the White House said on Monday.
Jane Goodall Talks Women In Science
When an 11 year-old Jane Goodall first began telling people in 1945 that she wanted to go to Africa, her declaration was often met with laughter. Goodall, who loved apes ever since infancy, when her father gave her a stuffed chimpanzee named Jubilee, was rebuked for many reasons: “We didn’t have any money and World War Two was raging … but mostly because I was a girl — I was the wrong sex,” she told The Huffington Post. Her family, she said, told her, “Jane get real. You know girls don’t do this kind of thing, living with animals in the forest.” Now 77, Goodall has become the world’s leading expert on chimpanzees. She travels 300 days out of the year, and holds five professorships, 24 degrees and more than 60 awards. And she doesn’t think being a woman kept her from “doing this kind of thing” at all. “In fact,” said Goodall, “my gender, I think it helped me.”
Drawing parallels with many of our discussions in class, women are dangerously underrepresented in science. And even when women are involved, they are usually paid less than men, given fewer opportunities and subjected to discriminatory masculine-dominated scientific vocabulary (as discussed in African Women Pursuing Graduate Studies in the Sciences: Racism, Gender Bias and Third World Marginality).
Consistant with the era she grew up in, Jane Goodall faced many roadblocks to entering the field of Zoology. However, in some ways, Goodall feels that being a woman helped her. She was largely ignored by men because they didn’t respect her enough as a female scientist to see her as competition.
Her gender worked in her favor, too, in her interactions with African communities, she said. She was doing field research in Tanzania just a year after the country gained independence and found that while there was a mistrust of white men who had controlled the country under colonialism, “They didn’t see me as a woman being a threat — they were much more likely to help me achieve what I wanted to achieve.”
Jane’s story has similarities and differences to Evelyn Hammonds in the article Never Meant to Survive: A Black Woman’s Journey. Because of her white privilege, Jane did not have to work as hard as Evelyn did, but she did still have to work twice as hard as a comparable man and deal with a lot of sexism out in the field, especially in the African communities she works in.
Like Evelyn, Jane Goodall is a revered scientist today and one of the most respected scientists in her field. Hopefully we can learn from their stories as a culture and work to advance women and minorities in science. Despite being “born the wrong sex”, Jane Goodall conquered all odds and pushed us further as a human race. Without her contributions we wouldn’t know nearly as much as we do about non-human primates. And since modern humans are evolved from primates, we wouldn’t know nearly as much about ourselves either.
