Must. Have. More. Vagina People. In. Science. Stories.
I wrote that like it was said by Gollum in Lord of the Rings. Hope that comes through.
The story? Two female science journalists -- two who try to include women and "diverse" voices -- gnash that they aren't including as many women as men in their pieces.
Adrienne LaFrance boohoos about this in The Atlantic, in a piece titled:
I Analyzed a Year of My Reporting for Gender Bias (Again):
And the subtitle:
In 2013, I found that, over the course of a year, about 25 percent of the people I quoted or mentioned were women. Two years later, a similar analysis yielded discouraging results.
From LaFrance's piece:
Some people would argue that I'm simply reflecting reality in my work. That's an overly generous interpretation. Another popular reaction is that my job as a journalist isn't to actively seek out diverse sources, but to find the most qualified people to help me tell the best possible story. I only agree with that in part: Yes, my job is to serve readers by finding the best sources for my stories, but why assume that the best source isn't a woman? By substantially underrepresenting an entire gender, I'm missing out on all kinds of viewpoints, ideas, and experiences that might otherwise sharpen and enhance my reporting.I'm not excluding women on purpose, but I can't say it's an accident, either. Reporters choose whom to interview. We carefully parcel out our time as we work toward deadlines. I spent several weeks working on this story about self-driving cars, for instance, and it occurred to me as I was reporting that I hadn't interviewed any women. In the end, deadline pressure and decisions about what to leave on the cutting-room floor trumped diversity.
It seems that happens a lot in my work. I asked Matias to run a follow-up analysis to see how many times I filed stories with no women mentioned. He looked at a slightly different dataset, expanded to include the 198 articles I wrote in all of 2015 and into part of January of this year. The result: Zero women mentioned in 119 of those stories, amounting to about 60 percent of my work. On top of that, I mentioned men more times than women in nearly three-quarters of my articles. Blergh.
Okay, so, what do I do? There are three steps, Matias suggests, that would make a difference. First, I could actively look for more stories about newsworthy women. "The key is that there are two major factors shaping who you mention: the people that your stories are about and the people who you rely on to make sense of those stories," he said.
Second, I could try to be more inclusive in what he calls the "one-off" stories, the pieces where I interview or mention a person once, but don't necessarily expect that person to be a fixture in my ongoing reporting. Third, and here's the area where I think putting in the effort could most improve my work in the long run, is trying harder to cultivate more women sources on my dedicated beats.
When I think now, off the top of my head, of some of the experts I routinely turn to--for comments on net neutrality, or artificial intelligence, or natural-language processing, or self-driving cars, or digital preservation--the first person on my to-call list is almost always a man. I need to change that.
Why? If you're turning to the most informed source on something -- which is what anyone who's not an idiot would do -- why change that? Sometimes that's a woman. Sometimes that's a man.
I'm also going to put more of an effort into asking for help. For example, I'm working on a big series of stories about robots and artificial intelligence right now. I've done more than a dozen in-depth, fascinating interviews for my first story--and every single source so far has been a man.
Christina Selby also gnashes similarly about this on The Open Notebook.
It's annoying that so-called science writers are so ignorant of research on the science of sex differences -- but it's to be expected. It's just not PC. You'll get kicked out of the lefty in crowd and have to give back your decoder ring.
I wrote recently about how it goes for those who don't parrot the feminist party line, in regard to an ad exec getting canned for admitting the truth -- that men tend to be fiercer competitors than women:
First let me say that there are certainly individual differences -- women who compete more like men do, for example: Fiercely, overtly, clawing their way to the top.But -- as Roberts notes -- a lot of women just want to be satisfied by their jobs.
As I've written -- from the work of Joyce Benenson, Anne Campbell, and others who research sex differences, men band together in groups and are comfortable with competition and hierarchies and fighting to be on top in a way women are not.
Women band together in dyads and compete covertly. This is where they "mean girls" thing comes from.) Standing out as better than the others is not a crowd-pleaser if you're female. So women evolved to show they are not a threat to other women -- not by chest-pounding, overt competition, but by sharing vulnerabilities.
Men need to compete because gaining status is how they get the best possible mate. Standards are different for women -- evolutionary standards, that is -- and while women surely have career ambitions, the ambition to rule the world just isn't the same for many women as it is for men.
Why is she going in with assumptions about the gender? Why can't she simply look for the best source without a qualifying gender, one way or another?
She seems to attributing this to an unconscious bias on her part, as if she's an internalized misogynist.
Are her sources suddenly no longer the best sources because they're 75% men?
Patrick at August 25, 2016 10:29 PM
“Vagina People”? Eww. Persons of gender, please!
Anton Sherwood at August 26, 2016 12:55 AM
Refreshingly, the comments on the article are overwhelmingly along these lines:
We want to hire good candidates. Whether they happen to men or women is irrelevant for us. The fact is, however, that in our market, there are much more men than women.
a_random_guy at August 26, 2016 1:17 AM
“Vagina People”? Eww. Persons of gender, please!
Gender studies foreigner, here.
Anyone who doesn't hire the best damn person for the job is an idiot.
1. Current assistant: Woman in her 40s who's been in jail and was starting over. White. Awesome.
2. Previous assistant: Man in his 30s, also starting over. Half Arab, half Eastern-European Jew. Awesome.
3. Previous, previous assistant: Lesbian in her then late 20s. White. (Obvious she was a lesbian when I hired her -- which I thought was great and would help me bring more perspective to my answers for my column, which it did.)
Previous, previous, previous assistants have been women and men, black and white and Korean (and first-generation American).
Except for one or two I hired very early on, who were just okay and adequate, I've loved them all.
Amy Alkon at August 26, 2016 5:28 AM
Darwin at its best.
Reporter focusing on something other than the "best" source. Will be clueless when a "male" reporter bests her at writing. Will blame her boss for being "biased".
Sad Puppies unite!
Bob in Texas at August 26, 2016 6:17 AM
but why assume that the best source isn't a woman?
Well, why assume that she is the best source? also, since you're a journalist, it's your job to find these people. If you find the that people you quote aren't diverse as you might like, then maybe that's on you?
It is up to you to be the Diogenes of your generation.
Oh, right, mumble mumble white male privilege mumble mumble.
Or here's an idea: force girls and young women into STEM against their will. That should work out well.
I R A Darth Aggie at August 26, 2016 7:15 AM
Didn't the Vagina People open for Rod Stewart back in 98?
I R A Darth Aggie at August 26, 2016 7:16 AM
Bad, I R A, bad.
Amy Alkon at August 26, 2016 7:28 AM
Yeah, their big hit was "YWCA". I particularly liked the one in the WAC uniform.
Ahem... Yes, the reporter fails to see the inherent contradiction in saying that she needs to find the best source, but that that source ought to be a woman. In addition to ignoring the ev psych, it's an approach that is ignorant of probability and statistics in several respects. It's well known that if you choose a random sample of people in STEM jobs, there are going to be more men than women.
In addition, her analysis of her work suffers from what the sabermetricians call "SSS" -- small sample size. 198 articles? Pshaw. Get back to me when you've written 4000. Especially considering that a reporter works a certain beat, and so is generally encountering a self-selected pool of sources. You just can't do a meaningful statistical analysis here. There's not enough data.
Cousin Dave at August 26, 2016 7:53 AM
You just can't do a meaningful statistical analysis here. There's not enough data.
That's probably right. Then there's the whole "what does that distribution look like?" which I couldn't even begin to speculate on. Normal distribution? maybe, but probably not.
Also, then there's the variability by sex, as men tend to be outliers both high and low, and women not so much. So, if you want the best and brightest, you're looking at men, with relatively few women at that end of the distribution.
And then there's selection bias, in that the author might be selecting people whose outlook agrees with her own.
For instance, I suspect that she's all in on AlGore's anthropogenic global climate change. As such, she's probably not going to quote Dr. Judy Curry extensively if at all, since she's not a True Believer and is quite agnostic, perhaps even skeptical.
I R A Darth Aggie at August 26, 2016 12:52 PM
IF (big IF) there is a strong signal (effect) a small sample size (like 11) can give you statistical significance. Obviously, a bigger one is better.
This applies even to non-parametric (meaning no normality assumptions) measures.
HOWEVER, if we did a simple logic check, we'd ask: what percent of people in the population are men? Does that differ from the percent of people quoted? Instead, she's asking "Does the percent quoted equal the percent in the OVERALL population?" which is not the population open for quoting, just experts.
Shannon at August 26, 2016 1:59 PM
Yes, my job is to serve readers by finding the best sources for my stories, but why assume that the best source isn't a woman?
Why assume it is?
By substantially underrepresenting an entire gender, I'm missing out on all kinds of viewpoints, ideas, and experiences that might otherwise sharpen and enhance my reporting.
Then why are you excluding women on purpose?
I'm not excluding women on purpose, but I can't say it's an accident, either.
Yes you are
In the end, deadline pressure and decisions about what to leave on the cutting-room floor trumped diversity.
So getting it right is more important than diversity? Then why are you complaining?
When I think now, off the top of my head, of some of the experts I routinely turn to--for comments on net neutrality, or artificial intelligence, or natural-language processing, or self-driving cars, or digital preservation--the first person on my to-call list is almost always a man. I need to change that.
Then do that, call all your male sources, explain how you want to stop using their expert advice as getting women's names attached to quotes is more important to you than getting the facts of a story right. Explain how they are all proto rapist misandrist pigs who oppress women and it is somehow magically their fault that you are a closet sexist and demand they refuse to return any of your future queries.
Put up or shit up bitch
lujlp at August 26, 2016 3:59 PM
Well, I'll give her this: She's not at all hesitant about confessing her sins in front of everybody.
I suppose she'll have to do some kind of penance now, won't she?
Won't she?
Old RPM Daddy (OldRPMDaddy at GMail dot com) at August 26, 2016 4:16 PM
I will fix that for you:
"In 2015, I found that, over the course of a year, about 23 percent of the people I quoted or mentioned were white. Two years later, a similar analysis yielded discouraging results."
NBA reporter's diversity lament.
Jeff at August 31, 2016 5:22 AM
Leave a comment