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Beautifully spoken
Now I want an anti-acknowledgment section in my dissertation too
Seems pretty strange. Maybe physics is different but my engineering class had quite a number of women in 2000 and my only strange interaction was one lady in our study group suggesting that if I didn’t let her cheat on my exam I didn’t have any balls… Maybe I should write an anti-acknowledgement…
Are you a woman? I’ve never met a woman who hasn’t had some experience with this. Sexism is everywhere, andnif 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.
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.
Well, you’re wrong, so maybe don’t be a condescending shit about it
The fact that you are so angry about what I have to say tells me I’m not.
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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.
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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.
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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.
When I was in elementary school, we always had a table at the back where the advanced students would do more difficult stuff than the rest of the class while not being completely isolated. The table was always me and 5 or 6 girls. When we graduated high school, I was the top-ranked boy - and the 22nd-ranked student overall. I just took it completely for granted that girls were smarter than boys (although I did perceive the very strong anti-intellectual culture among boys which seemed more impactful than native abilities).
It wasn’t until I went to college that I started encountering the belief that men were fundamentally smarter than women, even though every college and university I’ve attended had more women than male students and the women had much better academic performance. That was my first taste of the power of group delusion.
It cannot
But now they’re all “DEI hires,” at least in the US, so we’re fucked over here
Half way through the Hidden Figures movie I started to realize that the racist sexist people in charge really deserved to lose to the Russians.
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.
Never understood why some people so desperately need to be the smartest being in the universe. You’re a magic meat computers running on a system of hormones so complex that tweaking their balance just a bit can cause unforseen permament consequences. None of us have the right to call ourselves “smart”. Just chill and do your best.
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
That sounds like it was for her specifically in the first use
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!
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normalize it to the point that the anti-acknowledgements name names
This seems to be the Netherlands (TU Delft). Maybe it’s normal there.
I don’t think so. Academia is still a pyramid system, and a lot of people want a post-doc or not burn bridges
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.
White Persian?
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…
How people can walk out of a university with degrees and not understand how all areas of knowledge contribute towards each other and link together in ways that are not immediately obvious astounds me.
because of a long established undercurrent of competition within departments (and even between professors) for recognition and advancement. That and there are some people that have very large but very fragile egos that can’t allow another person or discipline to grab more sunlight than them.
I heard a joke once that a physical chemistry experiment will have 1000 data points per trend line; I organic chemistry will have 10 data points, and biochem will have 2 data points.
I bet to biochemists it’s very insulting. Back to the comment in the anti-acknowledgements, that was insulting without even being funny.
I like the ones that are symmetrical, like math thinks that physics is easy, and physics things that math is too unreal (I don’t remember the jokes)
a physical chemistry experiment will have 1000 data points per trend line; I organic chemistry will have 10 data points, and biochem will have 2 data points.
There is an element of truth in this, but that one biochem datapoint probably took more money and (wo)manpower than a hundred phys chem datapoints. Which is sad, because biological systems are usually more complex, and therefore more ‘noisy’, needing more datapoints for a definitive result. Medical studies get a lot of datapoints for obvious reasons, and because they can afford to do it thanks to Merck et al.
It’s got an element of truth but they’re still the butt of a joke
Engineers say crap about architects
As an engineer, this shit is so cringe… There is a youtube gaming channel with an alleged engineer who plays video games (often related to physics or building things), and his entire fucking personality is formed around mocking architects for being “stupid.” He literally substitutes in the word “architect” instead of calling someone stupid. He say’s “they’re an architect.”
Grow the fuck up goddamn. How insecure do you have to be?
I’m a heavy equipment mechanic, and every day in the shop I hear other guys complaining about how an engineer fucked up a design on a piece of equipment and that’s why it failed. Or that the engineer made it hard to work on on purpose. So cringe. I just roll my eyes at them and tell them if they are so smart then why aren’t they the ones designing the equipment lol
Its sad that all the fields feel the need to shit 9n each other. We as a society would got a lot further if we could all get along 😁
My mom is a biologist and complains how physicists always come into biology, try to reinvent everything without looking at any prior work, and then fail to execute their (sometimes interesting, sometimes not) method
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.
When I was at college us physicists would joke about the biologists and the chemists and the mathematicians and the engineers, and in turn they’d joke about us, and we’d all have a good laugh over it.
I suppose it would come down to the context and how it was said.
There’s always rivalry between physicist and biologists. Or chemists and biologists. Or biologists and biologists. Damn biologists, they ruined biology!
What she has been through is awful.
I wish though that more people knew the difference between an Acknowledgements page and a Thank You page.
This should properly be titled Anti Thanks.
Acknowledgements should only cover individuals and institutions whose contributions are a direct factor in the material body of the text.
You should let her know so you can make your way into the next printing
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.
Hero.
I love everything about how she’s calling out the culture in her realm of academia and casting it in Stone by being the first pages of her book.
Sucks it all happened. But proud to have it justly put on blast.
Absolute legend
why is this rachel too scared to name names?
Libel lawsuits are a bitch.
And this burden of proof is on the accuser.
I don’t doubt the stories, but a court would see it in a different way for a good reason. It’s hard to find a solution between slander and rightfully calling someone out.
The amount of dudes in this comment section who really aren’t getting it is astounding…
is it not normal to assign stripper names to all the women you want to have sex with?
/s
