We know that women students and staff remain underrepresented in Higher Education STEM disciplines. Even in subjects where equivalent numbers of men and women participate, however, many women are still disadvantaged by everyday sexism. Our recent research found that women who study STEM subjects at undergraduate level in England were up to twice as likely as non-STEM students to have experienced sexism. The main perpetrators of this sexism were not university staff, however, but were men STEM degree students.
I think the issue here is that it’s the default kneejerk reaction to not take a woman’s observations or experiments as seriously as a man’s. Sexism can exist in many insidious forms that don’t necessarily need to be conscious decisions made by the perpetrator. Academic rigor is of course important, so it should stay as academic rigor and nothing more.
The default kneejerk reaction in acidemia and high level engineering in general is to do just that. For example: “The fuq, you did not get superconductivity at room temperature.”
That’s not sexism…it’s healthy skepticism, and I think the root of all this. People get questioned in the field, hard…The good scientists and engineers put up with it, because it’s appropriate, and they can defend their data.
I get the point you’re trying to make, but I’ve seen enough healthy skepticism be misconstrued as sexism to be really skeptical of these results.
That’s not what they are talking about, and it’s super fucking obvious.