Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
The American Civil Liberties Union, once a great organization for defending free speech and civil rights in America, is circling the drain. They now have more than one foot in the extreme Social Justice arena, defending the right of surgically and chemically untreated biological men who identify as transwomen to compete in women’s sports.
Now the ACLU has a Human Rights Program headed by one Jamil Dakwar, whose bio is here and whose duties and background is described by the ACLU:
Jamil Dakwar (@jdakwar) is the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program (HRP) which is dedicated to holding the U.S. government accountable to its international human rights obligations and commitments. He leads a team of lawyers and advocates who use a human rights framework to complement existing ACLU legal and legislative advocacy, primarily focusing on promoting racial and economic justice and ending mass incarceration, police violence, and extreme sentencing. HRP conducts human rights research, documentation, and public education, as well as engages in litigation and advocacy before U.S. courts and international human rights bodies.
. . . Before coming to the United States, he was a senior attorney with Adalah, a leading human rights group in Israel, where he filed and argued human rights cases before Israeli courts and advocated before international forums.
He’s also an “adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), Bard College, and Hunter College”, and previously worked at Human Rights Watch.
The tweet below appeared on a Jewish website, but I can’t find it on Dakwar’s Twitter feed. He may have taken it down, perhaps because the notion of “Zionist supremacy” has a long history of connection to anti-Semitism. If you go through Dakwar’s tweets, though, you’ll find many of them excoriating Israel and valorizing Palestine (there is NO denigration of Palestine, which of course is a notorious human rights violator). This singling out of one country as a human rights violator and valorizing countries whose human rights violations are numerous is a sign of anti-Semitism.
I’ve put another of his tweets and one retweet below, but you’ll find much more on his Twitter feed.
The Summit for Democracy on December 9-10 (there will be another) was organized by Biden with the goal of “[bringing] together leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector in our shared effort to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.” You can see their schedule here, the list of participating delegations (many countries) is here (they all seem to be democracies); and I find no mention of Palestine. Why should there be, since Palestine, like many Middle Eastern countries, isn’t a democracy?
Dakwar’s response to Biden’s summit touts Palestinian organizations that “expose human rights violations” (e.g., by Israel). Read more about these six organization below:
As NPR and Reuters report, Israel has investigated these six organizations and designated them as fronts for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an organization that, as Wikipedia notes, “has been designated a terrorist organisation by the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia and the European Union”. NPR reports Israel’s allegations that the PFLP is “an armed faction that has carried out deadly attacks against Israelis,” All of the six organizations touted by Dakwar are thus extremely likely to have supported terrorism, and Israel has labeled them terrorist organizations. I won’t label them that, but I do believe that they’ve supported the PFLP.
So we have the director of the ACLU’s human rights wing defending organizations that transfer money to terrorists (the evidence for this is substantial).
It thus looks as if the ACLU has gone even woker, as now its Human Rights director is attacking Israel and defending Palestine constantly. But that’s what the Woke do, and what the extreme “Progressive Left” does.
1/3 ACT NOW to fight Israel's attack on Palestinian human rights defenders who work to hold Israel accountable for its war crimes.
Yes, when this post goes up at 10:59 a.m. Eastern U.S. time, Winter in the Northern Hemisphere has just begun. I thought it would be a good winter, but it looks like we’re in for another long bout of social distancing, mask wearing, people avoidance, and maybe even another jab. I hope to still go to Antarctica in March, and if that doesn’t happen I’ll be bummed.
A quick explanation of the solstice: because the Earth orbits the Sun but its axis of rotation is tilted at a constant angle, this is the day when the Northern Hemisphere is farthest from the Sun, while the Southern Hemisphere is closest. That’s why it’s the beginning of Summer below the equator and the beginning of Winter here (just that slight tilt makes all the difference in weather and light). It’s the shortest day of the year for us, and the longest day of the year below the equator. This diagram explains both the light and temperature phenomena.
Will it be a good winter (either for you or the world) or a bad one? A dumb poll:
Today we have a panoply of bird photos from Susan Harrison, professor and chair of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California at Davis. (We’ve seen some of her photos before.) Susan’s notes and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
These birds were seen at oases in Anza-Borrego State Park earlier this week. Most of them are desert specialists, including the phainopepla, verdin, gnatcatcher*, sparrow, and dove.
*Note about the gnatcatcher: In its non-breeding plumage it resembles the more widespread Blue-Gray Gnatcatcher. eBird listed only the Black-Tailed Gnatcatcher as being found at this location, the Merlin sound ID app identified it as a Black-Tailed, and the birds responded to a playback of the Black-Tailed’s call.
Welcome to the Cruelest day: Tuesday, December 21, 2021: National Hamburger Day, a truly American sandwich. Remember Wimpy’s love of burgers in the Popeye cartoon strip? He was always short of cash:
What’s the best burger in America? Many vote for Hodad’s in San Diego, which produces this behemoth. The owner recommends not taking it out of the wrapper, and eating the famous onion rings first:
IT’S WINTER! The first day of winter in the Northern Hemisphere is marked by the winter solstice, which occurs on today at 10:59 A.M. EST. Here are some related observances:
*The bad news is that the omicron variant of Covid-19, highly infectious, has now surged from being found rarely in the U.S. to the dominant variant causing new cases, comprising (according to last night’s NBC News) 73% of them. If you’re vaccinated, though, especially with a booster, the chances of a severe case are very slim, and the death rate with the three-shot combo is about 1 in a million. While 12 deaths from the omicron variant have been reported in Britain, there are no data on whether any of the dead had been vaccinated.
*Ghislaine Maxwell, accused of procuring underaged women for the late Jeffrey Epstein, is now waiting for the jury’s verdict, as her trial has ended. The jury deliberated for an hour yesterday and will resume deliberations today. The NYT’s takeaways from the closing arguments:
Prosecutors urged jurors to believe the accusers
Alison Moe, a federal prosecutor, began her closing argument by telling jurors that Ms. Maxwell had worked closely with Mr. Epstein, intentionally bringing young girls into his orbit knowing that he wanted to sexually abuse them.
“Maxwell was a sophisticated predator who knew exactly what she was doing,” Ms. Moe said. “She manipulated her victims and groomed them for sexual abuse.”
The defense focused on the unreliability of accusers’ memories
“Ghislaine Maxwell is an innocent woman wrongfully accused of crimes she did not commit,” one of her defense lawyers, Laura Menninger, announced to jurors as she began her summation.
My prediction, though I haven’t followed the case that closely, is that she will be found guilty on at least a couple of the six counts of which she’s accused—two counts of sex trafficking and four involving conspiracy “to entice and transport underage girls to Mr. Epstein for sexual abuse.”
*It doesn’t look like any Republican Senators will vote for Biden’s $2 trillion “Build Back Better” bill, which means that Joe Manchin’s stated opposition to the bill will kill it for the nonce. As the Associated Press reports, Biden and the rest of the Democrats in Congress are really peeved:
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer vowed on Monday that the chamber would vote early in the new year on Biden’s “Build Back Better Act” as it now stands, so every senator “has the opportunity to make their position known on the Senate floor, not just on television.” That was a biting reference to Manchin’s sudden TV announcement against the bill on Sunday.
But the conservative West Virginia Democrat and his party are so far apart, his relationships so bruised after months of failed talks, it’s unclear how they even get back to the negotiating table, let alone revive the sprawling more than 2,100-page social services and climate change bill.
“We’re going to work like hell to get it done,” said White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, repeating the phrase several times at a briefing but never saying how.
*What’s up with the Biden’s promised first cat? Well, we’re 348 days into the new administration, and we finally have some news. But it’s neither good nor bad. CNN reports that the Bidens have a New First Puppy, a German Shepherd named Commander, but they mention a cat in at the very end of the short report. (h/t John):
. . . The Biden’s [sic] have also promised they will add a cat to the White House menagerie.
In April, Jill Biden said in an interview that a female cat is “waiting in the wings.” Two people familiar with the Biden’s cat situation have told CNN the cat is being fostered with acquaintances until the best time for it to make the move into the White House and that date has not yet been set, but “it is expected to be in the very near future.”
It better be in the next three years, because it won’t have a home in the White House after that. All we get from Uncle Joe and Aunt Jill is temporizing about the cat! As T. S. Eliot wrote (in caps), “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME!” And what’s with the grocer’s apostrophe in the first paragraph?
*And speaking of cats, what’s happening with Jack the Cat in Boston? (Remember his terrible accident?) He’s improving but isn’t quite there yet. From part of the staff:
A note from his staff:
Hi Jerry! Jack went back to Angell a couple weeks after hardware was removed because he wasn’t using the injured leg as vets had predicted. Those X-rays looked great, they said he was healed well, sent home with some pain meds. He is now walking on it intermittently, he did walk on it while my parents were here, my dad just captured a moment when he was not using it. He jumps up on everything and walks across his staff using all four legs… I think he’s just taking his sweet time getting back to using all four legs all the time. He does not seem to be in pain.
Well, we’re not sure they landed at this rock, which does still sit in Plymouth Harbor. But it’s a tradition, and here it is:
(From Wikipedia): Plymouth Rock in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the traditional site of disembarkation of William Bradford and the Mayflower Pilgrims who founded Plymouth Colony in 1620. At the left of the rock can be seen where it was split in two in 1774, with the top part relocated to the town’s meetinghouse. The two parts were later rejoined in 1880, at which time the date 1620 was inscribed into the rock. Plymouth, Massachusetts, USA.
Remember, though, that the true date of America’s founding is 1619, a year earlier.
The Wikipedia entry on the Medal, the U.S.’s highest military award for valor, is fascinating: 19 people have received it twice. It’s also awarded posthumously, as to James Monteith, killed after performing heroic deeds during the Normandy Invasion. He was 26.
His grave in Normandy, adorned with the Medal of Honor annotation:
1872 – Challenger expedition: HMS Challenger, commanded by Captain George Nares, sails from Portsmouth, England.
Can you name the seven dwarfs? I can. I’ll put their names at the bottom, but first try to guess. Here she meets the dwarfs: (ignore the Disney mini-ads at the beginning and end)
1967 – Louis Washkansky, the first man to undergo a human-to-human heart transplant, dies in Cape Town, South Africa, having lived for 18 days after the transplant.
Nobody survived: here are the remains of the cockpit:
2020 – A great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn occurs, with the two planets separated in the sky by 0.1 degrees. This is the closest conjunction between the two planets since 1623.
Here’s the Great Conjunction with a caption from Wikipedia:
Stacked photograph of the great conjunction of 2020 four hours before closest approach, with Jupiter 6–7 arcminutes below Saturn. The moons Io, Ganymede, Europa, and Titan are visible.
1615 – Benedict Arnold, Rhode Island colonial governor (d. 1678)
1795 – Jack Russell, English priest, hunter, and dog breeder (d. 1883)
Yes, he bred the terrier. Here he is and a specimen of the d*g breed:
1804 – Benjamin Disraeli, English lawyer and politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1881)
1866 – Maud Gonne, Irish nationalist and political activist (d. 1953)
Gonne, a republican activist, was also a muse for Yeats, who proposed to her four times, and was turned down every time. I would like to have met her to see what so enamored Yeats:
1889 – Sewall Wright, American geneticist and biologist (d. 1988)
Two great biologists and geneticists, born a year apart to the day. I met Wright, but not Muller. Here’s H.J., who worked on flies and is looking at them with a loupe.
1917 – Heinrich Böll, German novelist and short story writer, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1985)
1918 – Kurt Waldheim, Austrian colonel, war criminal, and politician; 9th President of Austria (d. 2007)
1926 – Joe Paterno, American football player and coach (d. 2012)
1937 – Jane Fonda, American actress and activist
1940 – Frank Zappa, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (d. 1993)
Remember this poster?
1969 – Julie Delpy, French model, actress, director, and screenwriter
Another actor I’m smitten with. She’s now an American citizen. Her three movies with Ethan Hawke (the “Before Trilogy“) are very good.
She’s also spoken about the trend to pay women actors less:
Fitz and Zelda. If you can, do get the volume of letters between Fitzgerald and his daughter Scottie when she was young. They are FANTASTIC, but I see the book is expensive now.
Zelda Sayre and F. Scott Fitzgerald pose for a photo at the Sayre home in Montgomery, Ala., in 1919, the year before they married.
1988 – Nikolaas Tinbergen, Dutch-English ethologist and ornithologist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1907)
2009 – Edwin G. Krebs, American biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1918)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili seems to have been reading Steve Pinker’s new book. Hili despises revolutionary romanticism
Hili: I was grabbed by revolutionary romanticism.
A: And what happened?
Hili: Reason set me free.
In Polish:
Hili: Porwał mnie rewolucyjny romantyzm.
Ja: I co?
Hili: Rozum mnie wyzwolił.
And Andrzej took a cute photo of Kulka with her paw on the window:
From Athayde:
From Bruce:
From Nicole:
From Titania: The Year of Thoughtcrime!
I am so proud of the work we’ve done this year to censor offensive words and opinions.
Sadly, bigots are still *thinking* incorrectly, which can be just as damaging to social justice.
Let’s make 2022 the year when we find a way to stop people from thinking wrong thoughts.🤞
From Anna. We’ve read about Yasmeen before, though she’s no longer the DEI Senator for student at USC. Here’s some of her social-media hatred. As I said in my post, she has the right to tweet this stuff, but doesn’t qualify to be a “DEI” senator, since the “I” doesn’t include Jews. They gave her a different job.
Meet Yasmeen Mashayekh, the senator in charge of diversity, equity and inclusion @USCViterbi. Even after tweeting she wants to "kill every motherf**king Zionist," she has retained her position. We'd love to know WHY. A must WATCH and SHARE.https://t.co/UjfEUNqCXQpic.twitter.com/WNSWuT7vWu
For a long time some of my Jewish friends, including observant ones, have told me that there’s a resurgence of anti-Semitism in American, sometimes implying that it would get so bad that they were considering moving to Israel. I’ve always poo-pooed this apocalyptic idea, thinking that Jews are now part of mainstream America and, although a minority (about 1-2%, many of them nonbelievers), we weren’t a denigrated minority.
Well, things have changed since the ultra-progressive Left has taken over, and since there’s been a resurgence of white nationalism on the Right. The Left’s activities are ongoing, as with the “progressive” members of Congress voting for BDS initiatives, issuing anti-Semitic or anti-“Zionist” tweets, and showing increasing valorization of Palestine—an apartheid country if ever there was one. Right-wing anti-Semitism seems to be on the ultra-extreme right, and erupts as sporadic demonstrations, like the one in Charlottesville.
Whoever is responsible for this trend, the result is that we hear more about anti-Semitic incidents all the time. This isn’t just a news bias, since the mainstream media itself, like the NYT, aren’t especially pro-Jewish (they’re pro-Palestine); and the number of Jewish “hate crimes” is increasing. Jews are, in fact, on a per capita basis the religious group most targeted by such crimes:
According to the FBI data, 8,263 hate crimes took place in America in 2020, an increase of nearly 9% compared to the 7,287 reported in 2019. Of all reported hate crimes, 1,174 targeted victims due to their religion and 676 of them—54.9% of all religious bias crimes—targeted Jews. 53% of hate incidents targeting Jews involved the destruction, damage, or vandalism of property; 33% were instances of intimidation; 6% were simple assaults; 4% were aggravated assaults; 1% were instances of burglary or breaking and entering; and 1% were instances of larceny or theft.
This article below from the Washington Post (click on screenshot) might be an isolated incident, as it’s unique to my knowledge, but it might also display how far the rot has spread. (The article is reproduced almost verbatim in the Times of Israel as well.)
I’ll summarize what happened, and will put quotation marks around quotes from the pieces.
At Watkins Elementary school in southeast Washington, D.C. a group of third graders (~9-10 years old) were in the library doing a self-guided project. But the students were coopted by a school librarian who forced the students to reenact scenes from the Holocaust. Here’s what the students were forced to do:
One student, who happened to be Jewish, was told to play Hitler. At the end of the mock Holocaust, the student was told to pretend to commit suicide.
Other students were asked to pretend to be on a train to a concentration camp
At least one student was told to act as if he were dying in a gas chamber
Some students were told to pretend they were digging their classmates’ mass graves, and then had to pretend to shoot their classmates.
This is the most offensive part:
The instructor allegedly made antisemitic comments during the reenactment. The parent said that when the children asked why the Germans did this, the staff member said it was “because the Jews ruined Christmas.”
Can you believe that?
Although the instructor told the students not to say anything about this little exercise, the kids told their parents. The good news is that all hell broke loose, because some of the students were Jewish. The principal of the school, one M. Scott Berkowitz (probably a Jewish name as well) apologized in an email to the parents without naming the staff member (I now have her name; see below).
“I want to acknowledge the gravity of this poor instructional decision, as students should never be asked to act out or portray any atrocity, especially genocide, war, or murder,” Berkowitz said in the email.
The incident was reported to D.C. Public Schools’ Comprehensive Alternative Resolution and Equity Team. The staff member is now on leave, pending a school investigation.
“This was not an approved lesson plan, and we sincerely apologize to our students and families who were subjected to this incident,” a spokesperson for DCPS said.
The entire class met with the school’s mental health response team after the Friday incident, according to Berkowitz’s email.
The good news is that the school didn’t blow it off. But they shouldn’t have anyway; it’s only “good news” because Americans are becoming increasingly anti-Semitic.
Anti-Semitism is especially distressing when it’s among the black community (Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam are the worst offenders). Historically Jews and blacks have been friends, with Jews forming a large proportion of white civil rights activists in the Sixties.
This article (and several other sources) give the librarian’s name as Kimberlynn Jurkowski, and at first I thought she was of Polish descent. But her LinkedIn page, showing undoubtedly the right person (a “library media specialist” in Washington, D.C.), reveals that she’s black. (How did she get the surname Jurkowski?)
And she’s got a history that could charitably be described as “checkered”:
The librarian — identified as Kimberlynn Jurkowski — was accused in a tutoring scam in New Jersey that defrauded the Atlantic City school district of thousands of dollars and had her teaching licenses suspended for three years by the state Department of Education in 2017.
. . . A former Hamilton, Atlantic County resident, Jurkowski faced charges of theft by deception and fraud for allegedly billing the Hamilton school district for tutoring services for her two children that was never performed, according to the state’s order of suspension.
The Hamilton Township school district paid the cost of the tutoring to Bridges Education and Counseling Services, and its owner, Mildred Spencer — a friend of Jurkowski, according to the ruling.
In December 2013, Jurkowski and Spencer were accepted into a pretrial intervention program for first-time offenders for six months, and Jurkowski was forced to forfeit her employment in the school district, according to the Department of Education ruling.
So how did Jurkowski get hired as a school librarian at Watkins Elementary School? Did they not do a background check? Somebody at Watkins Elementary has some ‘splaining to do!
An addendum about local bigotry, from both papers. First, from the Post:
Other local schools have reported incidents of bigotry in recent months. At Woodrow Wilson High School in Northwest Washington, several swastikas, the n-word and the phrase “white power” were scrawled on the wall of a men’s bathroom early this month, according to reporting by student journalists at the Beacon, the school’s independent newspaper.
And from the Times of Israel:
Last month vandals broke into a fraternity house at George Washington University in Washington, DC, and desecrated a Torah scroll, tearing it apart and covering it with detergent.
I just noticed that the New York Timeshas a short piece on the incident, and names the perpetrator, as well as mentioning Jurkowski’s LinkedIn page, but doesn’t mention that she’s black. Is race relevant in a case like this? If a white librarian had asked black children to reenact scenes from slavery, wouldn’t the paper mention that the librarian was white? Had the librarian been an anti-Semitic white supremacist, you could have bet that every report would have mentioned that.
My guess is that it was just terribly inconvenient to mention the race of the perpetrator, which goes against The Narrative. The NYT has a history of omitting the race of the people who attacked ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York City over the last several years, though nearly all the attackers were black. When there’s a pattern like this, race does become relevant.
On Wednesday, as the 13-minute “60 Minutes” segment below explains, the $10-billion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope will be launched. Thirty days later, it will be nearly a million miles from Earth, in orbit around the Sun.
One of its goals is to detect leftover radiation traveling over billions of light years, giving us a glimpse of the past and, perhaps, into what “dark matter” is. But, as you’ll see, it can also answer many other questions.
I’m continuslly stunned by what humans can do with simple materials extracted from the Earth. And it’s great that this effort involves international cooperation.
I can’t say I disagree with this announcement, by Goran Hansson, that the Nobel Prizes will continue to be awarded for merit alone and not for fulfilling quotas involving gender and ethnicity. Click on the article from BBC News to see the story, below which we’ll look at another piece on “quotas.”
For some time there have been complaints that there has not been “equity” in Nobel Prizes: that too few women and people of color have won them. These inequities could result from several causes, or a combination of causes, but the one that’s always touted by those who complain is existing structural bias and discrimination. (See this article in Nature for such indictments by two powerful women in science, though it doesn’t mention the Nobels.) The equation of inequities in representation with ongoing bias is a pillar of Ibram Kendi’s ideas on anti-racism.
But there are two other reasons besides structural bias in science. One is that the dearth of women and people of color reflects past discrimination, so that only now, with biases diminishing towards zero, women and people are color are entering the pipeline to achievement—but haven’t yet reached the stage of professional accomplishment that would garner a Nobel.
The last explanation is a difference in preference coupled with comparative advantage. It’s well known that, at least in some Western countries, women score as well as men on science achievement tests, and score better than men in reading. That is, women are better overall than men. This means that any lack of achievement of women scientists cannot be due to a comparative lack of scientific ability. Rather, researchers have suggested that women prefer going into the humanities because they are better at it, and want to do what they’re better at (“comparative advantage”). Alternatively it may be that STEM fields simply aren’t as attractive to women as to men. All of these are suggested in the BBC article. (I don’t know any such data on people of color, but of course in the U.S. black and Hispanics score lower than whites and Asians on tests of reading, math, and science.)
But let me quote from the BBC piece:
The head of the academy that awards the Nobel Prizes in science has said it will not introduce gender quotas.
Goran Hansson, head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said they want people to win “because they made the most important discovery”.
Since its inception in 1901, 59 Nobel Prizes have gone to women. [JAC: There have been 975 prizes total. The 59 Prizes to women involve 58 women as Marie Curie won twice.]
Maria Ressa was the only woman honoured this year. Marie Curie was the first woman to get the prize – and remains the only woman to get it twice.
“It’s sad that there are so few women Nobel laureates and it reflects the unfair conditions in society, particularly in years past, but still existing. And there’s so much more to do,” Mr Hansson told the AFP news agency.
“We have decided we will not have quotas for gender or ethnicity,” he said, adding that the decision was “in line with the spirit of Alfred Nobel’s last will”.
“In the end, we will give the prize to those who are found the most worthy, those who have made the most important contributions,” he said.
I think that’s a fair decision. If they had decided to fulfill quotas, that would mean giving prizes not to those who make the most important contributions, but to help even out a disparity in sexes and races. So, for example, the 2020 Medicine and Physiology prize shared by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna was an excellent choice (and one that cut out male competitors), for their work was highly important by anyone’s standards. Nobody can say that these women were chosen to achieve gender parity!
We’ll focus on gender, as we have more data on that, and this is the focus of the BBC article and most complaints about disparity in Nobels. It’s true that women haven’t received half of the Nobel Prizes over time, and this can be explained by all three factors above, but largely because, due to bias or oppression in the past, there simply weren’t that many women in science (or in literature). I think most of us recognize that this gender bias is disappearing rapidly; indeed, universities throughout the West are trying very hard to recruit women professor and students. But there’s still a disparity in STEM participation. This may or may not change much in the future (though it’s certainly changed during my lifetime!), but whether we’ll ever achieve gender parity in academic representation—or Nobel Prizes—is something I don’t know. All we can do, and must do, is offer everyone equal opportunity to enter the scientific pipeline, and avoid gender or racial discrimination within the pipe.
More from the BBC and Hansson:
And while more women are being recognised now compared to previous decades, Mr Hansson said, that number was increasing “from a very low level”.
“Keep in mind that only about 10% of the professors in natural sciences in western Europe or North America are women, and even lower if you go to East Asia,” he said.
However, the scientist said they would “make sure that we have an increasing portion of women scientists being invited to nominate, and we will continue to make sure we have women on our committees – but we need help, and society needs to help here”.
“We need different attitudes to women going into sciences… so that they get a chance to make these discoveries that are being awarded,” he added.
Again, the last statement implies structural bias against women, but where are the data that there are “different attitudes to women”? There is no consistent data showing discrimination against women in STEM hiring or grant-getting; in fact, one can cite research showing both sides. In the absence of consistent evidence, all we can do is avoid personal bias and offer equal opportunities. Note that Hansson also mentions the severe dearth of women in the natural sciences in Asia, Europe, and North America.
When Charpentier got her Prize, she hoped the award would encourage women to go into STEM, but she also noted a comparative lack of interest of women in going into STEM.
From the BBC again:
Last year, scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna became the first two women to share the honour when they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the tools to edit DNA.
It was the first time any of the science prizes had been awarded to two women without a male collaborator also listed on the award.
At the time, Prof Charpentier said: “I wish that this will provide a positive message specifically for young girls who would like to follow the path of science… and to show them that women in science can also have an impact with the research they are performing.”
She added that there was “a clear lack of interest in following a scientific path, which is very worrying”.
I’ve given my position many times on this site. I favor some forms of affirmative action in academia for minorities, including women (they’re actually more numerous than men), though settling on how to structure that affirmative action is tricky. The affirmative action I have in mind involves accepting students in colleges and universities, and in hiring faculty. But these preferences should, I think, stop once someone is hired, and they should certainly not apply to awards and prizes. Thus I think the Nobel Committee’s statement is appropriate, though I’m not sure why they made it. Could it be that public pressure was bearing down on the Academy?
Again, all one can do in the face of the latter is to be sure that everyone is made aware of the excitement of science and then to avoid bias. As the following article states, we need to ensure equal opportunity, not equal outcome, for equal outcomes assumes that all groups have identical preferences or interests.
I love this photo of Doudna and Charpentier. I think this is in Stockholm when they got their prizes, but I can’t be sure. It does show some joint award, though, and the affection between the two women, who weren’t really collaborators but independent researchers.
There are those who think that there should be no affirmative action in any aspect of science—that hiring, promotion, funding, and awards in STEM be solely on the basis of merit. One of these is Lawrence Krauss, who wrote the following piece in a recent Quillette (click on screenshot to read):
Now Lawrence is talking about disparities between men and women in funding by NSERC in Canada and other countries, not in hiring or awards, but the principle he sets forth is one I agree with:
The standard of “fair access” that NSERC planners set out here implies a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between mandating equality of opportunity—which is desirable—and mandating equality of outcome. The latter would lead to overt identity-based discrimination against members of groups whose applications, in some cases, would otherwise be successful under a purely merit-based approach. That a major research-funding agency is promoting such a misunderstanding in regard to policy formulation is an issue of some concern.
Where I differ from Krauss is that I favor equality of opportunity above the college-admissions or academic-hiring level, but also some tweaking of outcomes (a bit of equity) to bump up minorities at both levels. Once people are hired, again, the affirmative action should stop. (It goes without saying that I don’t think grossly unqualified people should be admitted to college or hired for professor jobs, as that does nobody any favors.)
Krauss notes that the funding disparity between men and women in Canada (and Australia) is immediately imputed to systemic sexist bias at the present time, but gives data showing that the difference is explained completely by different career stages of grant applicants. At early stages, funding is roughly equal between men and women, but at senior stages men get more funding. But that’s solely because there are simply more men at senior stages of their careers. Here are the data of grants given in Australia and what Krauss says about them:
A bar chart included in a previous Nature article on this subject shows the total value of grants awarded to men and women in 2019, categorized by seniority quintile. In the first (most junior) quintile, women actually were awarded more grant money than men got. In the second quintile, men had a slight edge. This edge grew substantially in the third and fourth quintiles, leading up to a massive difference in the fifth (i.e., most senior) quintile, which shows the most senior male scientists being awarded $81 million, compared to just $21 million for the most senior female scientists. This means that, of the money going to senior scientists, women got just over 20 percent.
The caption: “Male (red) vs. Female (green) Investigator Grant recipients in 2019, by applicant seniority.”
Krauss’s analysis:
The latest Nature article concludes with a quote from Teresa Woodruff, an obstetrician and advocate for women in science at Northwestern University. She describes the data as a wake-up call to funders, who now should “address the issues.” But the Nature analysis glides over one of the more obvious issues lying in plain sight: As the 2019 article showed, there tends to be fewer senior women (just 17 in 2019) applying for grants, as compared to senior men (75). In 2021, the numbers were similar: According to Nature, “at the most senior level … there were about four times more male than female applicants”—an 80/20 male-female applicant split that corresponds almost exactly to the $81 million/$21 million split in awarded 2021 grants.
This pattern has an obvious explanation: There are simply more men than women in the senior ranks of Australia’s health and medical researchers—a fact that shouldn’t surprise anyone, since most scientific fields were, until just a few decades ago, almost entirely dominated by men. Thankfully, this era is over, and Australia’s medical schools achieved gender parity in admissions a long time ago. Thus, one might expect that the funding of male and female medical researchers at the junior level would be roughly even, while being progressively more skewed toward men among older generations—which is exactly what the data reported by Nature shows to be the case.
While this is the kind of data regularly adduced to show structural sexism in STEM, the explanation is not nearly as insidious.
Finally, Krauss makes a more general statement that goes beyond funding:
We have gone down this road before, when strict quotas were placed on Jewish scientists within my own academic sphere, physics, as a means of excluding Jews (including very nearly, future Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman) from US graduate schools. Today, we properly regard such policies as shameful, both for discriminating against individual human beings and for misdirecting society’s scientific resources. Medical science is a life-and-death endeavor, and decisions about how that science should be funded must be based on the quality of research proposals, not the skin color or sex of those submitting them.
The comparison with Jews isn’t really apposite, however, as Jews were discriminated against: the quotas were the maximum number of Jews allowed to be admitted. The minority group, in other words, was discriminated against. What Krauss is attacking here are quotas against the majority group that favor minority groups. (I suppose you could see this as a “male quota”).
And I still favor preferential admission and hiring of minorities (but not grossly preferential, is as happening in California) as a form of reparations for past discrimination and, as Charpentier noted, to provide some role models. Again, we should accept only qualified applicants, and any deficit in training can be addressed with mentoring or tutoring.
All applicants for jobs or admissions, however, should exceed some bar decided as “qualified for the slot”. What that means is above my pay grade, but surely far more qualified people apply to America’s best colleges than get into them.
I know the arguments against affirmative action, but I won’t try to counter them now.
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