I don’t know why this tweet amused me. Maybe because I’m at the diversity session of #ICHEP2018, a conference on particle physics where I gave a talk about ... particle physics, being a person who has nothing to do with STEM lol
Actually turns out I was in the wrong room. I knew there were too many white men and not enough women in the room lololol
The only men at the diversity session so far are the ones who are speaking or chairing it LMAO YAY PARTICLE PHYSICS
Wait we’ve got a stray
I actually was planning to skip this session but my friend Brian Beckford is giving a talk and promises me he will be mentioning women of color :-) Brian is a #BlackandSTEM physicist at the University of Michigan.
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Students of color feeling marginalized in STEM are not always people in need of remedial programming and assuming they need remedial programming is really problematic/hella racist
Learn to talk about people of color like we're the same species as you
Now that I have a moment to expand on this: what I said to the room where this was said today is that white people are the majority of people on welfare. It’s important to know the difference between majority and disproportional. Minorities are disproportionately poor, yes.
Tomorrow and Tuesday I’m attending the #astro2020 decadal early career researchers workshop and as part of the requirements to attend, I had to read about 200 pages of (publicly available) documentation relating to the last decadal. I learned some things!
1. Apparently the NASA budget doubled between 1988 and 1991
2. The National Research Council *is* part of the National Academies (which are charged by law to produce a decadal survey in the various earth and space sciences every 10 years)
There is seriously a thread of white women in my mentions very committed to denying white women's complicity in white supremacy, in response to a tweet from a Black Lives Matter organizer who has, you know, thought about this for longer than 5 minutes
When I pointed out to one of them that she was a repeat offender, she said I had cyberbullied her when calling her out on something I saw her do last year by letting folks know that her response to me was condescending and privileged
When I pointed out she had shown up in my mentions today, she deleted her tweet and didn't apologize for acting like I was the aggressor. Now every time I think the thread has died, another white woman steps in to wake it up again. Almost all of them are scientists.
"We write here first to state, in the strongest possible terms, that the humanity of any person, regardless of ascribed identities such as race, ethnicity, gender identity, religion, disability, gender presentation, or sexual identity is not up for debate."
"Belittling the ability and legitimacy of scientists of color and white women scientists using such flimsy pretexts is disgraceful, and it reveals a deep contempt for more than half of humanity that clearly comes from some source other than scientific logic."
Thing I felt grateful for today: as a child of divorce and an international activist family, I spent a lot of time on planes and sometimes in passport offices alone, and along the way, many adults took an interest and talked to me and this meant I never felt alone or scared
Props to the woman at the passport office who enjoyed my diatribe about Jane Austen and later mailed me an old BBC adaptation that I hadn’t seen. Btw turns out a 13 yo needs a parent present to renew a passport, much to my dad’s chagrine lol
And to the many business travelers who, rather than wondering what the hell I was doing in business class (where the flight attendants often put unaccompanied minors back then), played cards with me and talked to me about my dolls.
This tweet 👇🏽 is flat out wrong. Speaking as someone who does gender studies in addition to particle physics — gender studies is actually a notoriously difficult field to get published in, harder than physics actually, and only a few journals are really taken seriously.
It was actually easier for me to get a peer-reviewed paper on gender studies published in an astronomy journal than to get one published in a gender studies journal. I’ve now been successful in both. Let the critics say the same. ;-)
One piece of advice I got from a senior woman in science, technology and society studies who does race & gender in technology history was that gender studies is a very hard field and I should be careful. Her husband is a string theorist, so I think she knows what she’s saying. 😉