Facebook users are shocked to discover that a popular science blog is not actually written by a man.
It's terribly sad, don't you think, that we live in a society where gender stereotyping still takes place.
Sometimes it's deliberate, sometimes it's learned, and sometimes it's subconscious or oblique.
But it is never acceptable.
So headlines last week about the astonishment that rippled through Facebook when a popular science blogger turned out not to be a man, but a woman, was certainly eye rolling.
The fact that she was then met with an avalanche of sexist comments when her identity was revealed is tiresome and depressing.
Elise Andrew is an English science nut and blogger who lives in Canada. Her Facebook page 'I F***ing Love Science' has, according to the Guardian, more than 4.2 million fans, and has been running for over a year.
She also owns three other pages, covering biology, astrophysics and astronomy, and earth sciences.
So sounds like she pretty much knows her onions. Or should I say her allium cepa.
However, all her expertise and passion apparently become redundant in the light of her being a woman, which was discovered when she published a female avatar on her Twitter account.
A flood of remarks relating entirely to her gender and how she looked ensued.
These included 'F.ck me! This is a babe ?!!'
'Holy hell, you're a HOTTIE!'
'You mean you’re a girl, And you’re beautiful? Wow, I just liked science a lil bit more today', and
'Holy f***ing balls of all that is ass, you're cute', to quote but a few.
This one was an allusion to her interest in astrophysics…. 'Are there kitchens in space?'
Yes, you read that right.
Fortunately, there were chaps who didn't see what all the fuss was about:
'My fellow dudebros: Chillax. In science, sex is just a single genome characteristic, ' was one comment.
What's clear from this story, aside from the predictability of the asinine brayings of a classroom of ubergeeks, is that occupational segregation is still very much alive and kicking.
There are theories behind why women are still being frozen out of the sciences, including hierarchical segregation and territorial segregation.
According to the JILA Physics Institute in Boulder, ‘until late in the twentieth century, women faced significant, and sometimes insurmountable, challenges in gaining access to higher education in the physical sciences and engineering. In the physical sciences, women who did succeed in earning doctorates often faced employment discrimination and encountered barriers to combining a career in science with having a family’.
It goes on to give examples.
There is also still the stereotype that lives and breathes in institutes of education and in the workplace that men are better at science than women.
So what can we do?
Firstly, and most importantly, we need to educate our children out of habitual gender stereotyping.
In the UK, there are, thankfully, organisations who are trying to do just that.
Women into Science, Engineering and Construction (WISE) are an organisation who work with schools, educational establishments, students and employers to try and redress the gender disparity in the STEM workforce (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).
They have, 'a mission to increase the involvement of young women and other under-represented groups in apprenticeships in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.’
Aiming to 'increase the gender balance in the UK's STEM workforce, pushing the presence of female employees from 13 per cent as it stands now, to 30 per cent by 2020'.
So just 13 per cent of those currently working in science, in technology, in engineering and in mathematics are women.
What a costly and depressing waste of resource and talent.
At an educational level, overall, the picture is certainly improving, with girls just as likely as boys to study GCSE stem subjects.
However, there is still a thinning of women the higher up the pipeline you go – there is a drop off at A level, and so on through further education and employment.
And because only 13 percent of all STEM jobs in the UK are occupied by women, this means that STEM industries struggle to find women for senior appointments, and that fewer women are setting up STEM businesses – which in turns limits the potential for economic growth.
Statistics back this up, and make for sorry reading.
So here comes the science bit.
- Just 27 per cent of Science and Engineering Technicians, 15 per cent of ICT professionals and 5.5 per cent of Engineering professionals are female.
- Fewer than 1 in 10 of STEM managers are female.
- Just 11 per cent of STEM business owners are women, compared to 33 per cent who are owners of non-STEM businesses.
- Of FTSE 100 companies in STEM sectors, 13 per cent of Board Directors are female compared to 17 per cent of Board Directors of companies in other sectors (which is in itself abysmal).
So the evidence is clear that the blockage experienced by young women in the education system has an enormous knock on effect later in life.
Thankfully, not so for our female scientist. So what does Elise Andrew think of the reaction to the news of her being a woman?
Her first response was surprise – 'EVERY COMMENT on that thread is about how shocking it is that I’m a woman! Is this really 2013?'
She also said 'It's a sad day when a woman being funny and interested in science is considered newsworthy.'
Wait… what is she trying to say here – that women can be funny too?
Well, just don't tell the boys…
