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Normalise this. In the past women would have been accused of being unprofessional to have called men out like this. That’s the only reason why every woman doesn’t do it.
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
normalize it to the point that the anti-acknowledgements name names
There is an excellent Science channel on Youtube and Nebula with a Physics PHD who’s made some eye-opening content about harassment and misogyny in STEM and Academia.
Here are two videos on that subject that are great to start out with
I recently got recommended her channel. She’s amazing, like Jenny Nicholson but for science.
Love her videos! Really opened my eyes to a lot of this.
She’s a great science communicator. Another famous Youtuber (Captain D) called her “the Jenny Nicholson of science” her Dark Matter video is my favorite, though her Gell-Mann Amnesia video is a “must watch” imho.
Watch her dark matter video. And the follow up. But for the love of God, dodge the comments. SO MANY people read the title of the video and then went to make comments calling her wrong, even though she spent like an hour specifically addressing the arguments they make.
Dark matter is not a theory. It’s a problem. Fuck!
I thought it was a theory like how gravity works is a theory.
Like I said, watch her video. She goes into lots of detail and gives a much better explanation than I could ever hope to. But here I go anyway:
The gist of it is that “dark matter” isn’t really an attempt to explain anything. Like, theory of gravity, we have some good rules, things accelerate depending on mass and proximity to other things. Theory of dark matter? Not so much.
Dark matter is a problem in the sense that it’s an observable phenomenon we can’t really explain. When we observe really far away stars and galaxies, they interact in ways that imply far larger amount of matter than what we are actually observing. So where’s that matter? We don’t know! Dark matter! But unfortunately that nomenclature and the many ideas surrounding what does cause the dark matter phenomenon have deeply clouded the conversation.
Dark matter is not a theory of how things work. It’s a problem to be solved.
So it’s more we know it’s there we just don’t currently know what it is.
It isn’t theoretical much like the stink around me rn isn’t theoretical even if I cannot see or smell it with my stuffy nose because when I farted the dog barked at me and ran out of the room. I might not be able to directly observe it but clearly it is there.
Uhh I guess it’s kinda like that, minus you knowing you farted. Imagine the dog barked and ran but you genuinely had no idea why that happened. As a joke you go “dang that was like I farted so bad even the dog couldn’t stand it!” But now everyone heard you say you farted, so any time a dog barks and runs away they call it “Rowbot’s fart.”
Dark matter may not literally be matter of any kind at all. All we know for sure is that objects with a certain amount of observable matter are, for some reason, behaving like they have much, much more. But also not with any consistency; some of them act like they have 30% more, others like they’re twice their size. We just call it dark matter because “dang it’s like there’s a bunch of matter we can’t see.” But we don’t really know what’s causing the discrepancy.
To be fair, it’s not like we’re totally clueless about it, but as of yet no single hypothesis has any concrete proof.
The only thing you should post in those comments is:
Dark Matter
Where is it?
How much?
Where is it?
How much?
Do we need it?
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.
It cannot
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
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.
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.
I can recommend looking into “science days” and stuff like that. It makes you a lot more hopeful for the future to see a lot of curious, open-minded 12-year olds.
And then they likely become the usual cynic adults, but hey, you tried.
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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.
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.
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Are you a woman? I’ve never met a woman who hasn’t had some experience with this. Sexism is everywhere, and if 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.
True, the patriarchy harms everyone. Sexism against women harms them (even kills) from interactions with men, negatively affects education, career, even hobbies. Leads to medical bias which also may kill them. Leads to them being trafficked and used as sex slaves. Experience female genital mutilation.
Andrew Tate is a hugely popular figure amongst young men. Those men are being harmed by the patriarchy but don’t realise or maybe care as they’re too busy harming women. It’s not the same for men, they’re massively privileged compared with women.
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.
Oh, have you been sent to die? War duties are irrelevant for most men. The last conscription in my country was WW2 and women died then too, as nurses near the front, in the blitz, as spies, etc. All genders join the military now.
Meanwhile I think the conviction rate now, in 2025 for rape of women by men is 1%. That means you won’t get justice if you’re a woman reporting a serious crime. Women in america are dying because they can’t get healthcare for their miscarriage and pre-teen girls forced to carry their rapists baby. On shitter dickheads openly gloat ‘your body, my choice’ with no censorship, because abuse of women isn’t censored. Andrew Tate. Not really the same situation for men and women, is it? Women aren’t causing men to commit suicide but men are still controlling, belittling, abusing and killing women.
If you’re actually against the patriarchy you have to realise that it fucks women over way more and always has. We’re only seeing a backslide right now, and I suppose women in the west are lucky they aren’t in a country they would be stoned to death, or not be allowed to be overheard talking, seen inside their own home, etc.
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.
I have empathy for men, in fact all genders are experiencing all of the issues you had mentioned as specific to men. I mentioned conscription because that’s something which hasn’t happened in the west in the lifetime of most men alive today. I might as well complain that women can’t vote. Why don’t you have empathy for women who can’t vote? You know why women usually don’t usually fight in war? Because men don’t just try to kill them, they use sexual violence against them. Not just the enemy but their own comrades.
I don’t know if you realise but women also wage slave and for a hell of a lot less money usually. They’re cleaners, carers, doing the dirty jobs noone else wants. Then they often go home and take care of their kids and chores -women’s work. All while getting zero respect from society. And if the man leaves for any reason, she’s a single mother and therefore worthless. If you want to learn, watch the maid. That’s a good example of a woman struggling against the patriarchy. The father of the kid in that show is struggling too and I do think he deserves empathy but I see who has it worse.
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
why is this rachel too scared to name names?
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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.
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!
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?
The amount of dudes in this comment section who really aren’t getting it is astounding…
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Holy shit. Get em.
For anybody having difficulty reading the text:
Anti Acknowledgements
There have unfortunately also been people who have been less than helpful in my journey here. I wanted to acknowledge those too, because I know I am not unique in this experience.
No thank you to the physics study association that made me sing songs about how women couldn’t study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a ‘stripper name’ within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of “computer girl”. No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to ‘apologise’ months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so “no hard feelings remain hopefully”. And no thank you to him for attending every conference I’ve been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was “surprising” that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with “you should consider it”. No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists “don’t know how to design an experiment”. No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent. And finally, no thank you to the executive board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up to a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted.
I wish I could tell you this has all made me stronger somehow but in reality it has only shattered my confidence. You have made me feel like I do not belong in science and I cannot forgive you for that.
-Rachel
thank you
You’re welcome! 🙂
Dammit. Should have checked the comments first.
Oh, uh, why?
Because I squinted my way through the image first. I should have read the comments first.
Yeah. We had to do that kind of too, so we decided to type it all up. Opened up a notepad like program and wrote every single thing in the image, then went back to check for mistakes we made. We missed a few but the browser’s spell checker picked them up thankfully 🙂
It’s greatly appreciated, even though I derived no benefit. You make lemmy better.
Thank you. We try!
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.
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 😁
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!
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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
can’t wait to experience that myself!! 🥰
