The Reading Room

scienceing:

mybluedecember:

princess-munchkin:

How the fuck does Bill Nye expect this to happen? What do you want to do, force women to enroll in science courses, regardless of whether or not they want to do it? Just for the sake of having “enough” women? Why the fuck do these fractions matter so much? It’s not like people are holding guns to our head and threatening to kill us if we become interested in science.

Maybe, just maybe, a lot of us DON’T FUCKING WANT to be scientists. Is that a crime?

Hi there, princess-munchkin. Female engineering student here. 

Bill Nye is not saying that you HAVE to be a scientist, and you are right that no one is holding a gun to my head because I am interested in science, but let me tell you some of the struggles of being a woman in the STEM fields. 

1) Because I am a woman, I am not expected these fields. I first fully realized this when I was in high school, on my robotics team. See, although my robotics team was about 50% female, most of the women were part of the “business administration” side of things: finance, marketting, PR, membership, etc. Was this a problem? Absolutely not. But I was there to be an engineer, and specifically, to be the robot programmer. This was met with a lot of hesitation at first from some of the other students (all of whom happened to be male. This is not necessarily a bad thing.) You see, all of the robot programmers before me were guys. Computer programming is just a thing that guys do, or so they thought. Even after I had proved myself to the mentors on the team, many of the students still underestimated my abilities. There were rumors going around that I wouldn’t have been able to program the robot at all if the lead software mentor wasn’t there to help me. This was just flat-out false, but it wasn’t until I won an award for the team that the other students actually saw my merit. 

2) There is not a lot of encouragement for women to go into these fields. I first noticed this when I was in elementary school. I was always interested in math, science, you name it, but many of my teachers and family members pushed that to the side for a long time. When I asked for legos for christmas, I would get ballet slippers. In fact, for a long time, I was training to be a professional dancer. I loved to dance. I loved math more, but no one seemed to notice that about me. It wasn’t until I had a long conversation with one particular teacher in high school that I decided to look into engineering. I had never even considered it as an option before, because no one decided to encourage me to pursue my interest in science. If it hadn’t been for that teacher, I would probably not be at the school I am at right now. 

3) For a long time, Engineering/Science/Math WAS a “boys only” club. Let me tell you when some of the top technical schools and societies started letting women in:

• RPI, The oldest tech school in the country, founded in 1824. Started admitting women in 1942 to “replace men called to war.” Campus housing for women wasn’t constructed until 1966. 
• Tau Beta Pi, the Engineering Honors Society - Founded in 1885. Started admitting women in 1968.
• Caltech - Currently rated #3 in undergraduate engineering. Founded in 1891. Started admitting women in 1970. 
• Georgia Tech - Currently rated #5 in undergraduate engineering. Founded in 1885. Started admitting women in 1952. 

Do you see the implications of this? Engineering has been a part of our society since around the late 1800s (in the case of RPI, since the 1820s), but women weren’t even allowed in for the most part until the 1950s, regardless of their merit. 

4) Because of the fact that it was a “boys only” club for such a long time, there are not a lot of women engineers and scientists to look up to. When you’re reading your physics, chemistry, and math text books, the majority of those theories were came up with by men. It is true that much of our history was written by White Men, but this does not mean that the fact that there are few women scientists to look up does not matter. 

So, as you can hopefully see, princess-munckin, or anyone else that shares the opinions of princess-munchkin, Bill Nye was not arguing that women that are not interested in STEM should go into those fields anyway. But he IS arguing against all of the systematic barriers set up against women who ARE interested in engineering and science. There are several women out there who are just as good as the boys at math and science, but will never pursue their interests because it just doesn’t seem like an option. That was me for a long time. I am super grateful for the fact that I fought against that, and that I ended up where I am. 

if you don’t like science, fine. Don’t be a scientist. But if one day you have a daughter and she shows interest in being a scientist, PLEASE encourage her. Because Bill Nye is right, there needs to be more women scientists in the world. 

A+ comment

Okay. Statistics are not an individual measurement. Statistics apply to populations, not individuals, and the larger the population the more closely it applies.

The population of the world is so large (and the number of scientists is also so large) that individual variation shouldn’t have a significant effect on the overall statistics. There’s no major effect of femininity that would cause such a drastic difference in the proportion of female humans and the proportion of female scientists, so without external forces one could reasonably expect the proportions to be about the same. The fact that they’re not close together means that there are forces preventing it. Things like the collective systematic pressure that mybluedecember mentioned, among others.

He’s not saying that we need to force people to become scientists. He’s saying we should stop forcing people not to. Stop telling them from birth that it’s not for them. Stop making it harder for them at every step of the way. If being female doesn’t have a major effect on your ability to be a scientist (and it doesn’t) and half the humans are female (and they are, approximately), then in any reasonably large population (and seven billion is really very large), having a scientist split other than approximately one-half means someone’s hindering science by forcibly adjusting the proportions when it’s unnecessary.

And Bill Nye has no time for that sort of bullshit.

(via thursdayangelsong)

homeschool-winner:

sheeples:

crowsephone:

tumblino:

dragondicks:

stamps-no:

Not a stamp but

This man feels so strongly about lesbians’ private sexual lives and how they should live their lives
That he wrote this entire thing.

( 　ﾟ,_ゝﾟ)

jesus christ I think I went cross-eyed reading this

??????????

you’ve got to be fucking squiddling me. 

this dude sounds so much like a virgin with rage that he’s now lashing out lesbians for not fucking dudes.

btw, the name of that eminem song that he quoted is called “Fuckin Crazy”, which is an apt description of this entire mess.

Except you know maybe in a sexual relationship it’s not all about te genitalia, but what’s attached to it? Yeah.

ok this is rly awful but uh just

“ding ding ding, do your thing”

tl;dr why are you using a dildo instead of my dick you obviously secretly want it

homeschool-winner:

doridachi:

causticgambler:

kitsubasa:

A man gets stabbed in the chest with a bit of wood that makes him forget all his skills. Accompanied by his mum, he travels Europe looking for a cure for chest-wood, while beating up old men and narrowly dodging incest.

you’re a tiny metaphysical being who has to shoot down cyber-spaceships with snare drums

a baby fights gross half-babies and stuff in a basement because their mom is a psychopath

an elf in a green hat falls down a hole and dreams of a falling moon and a freak in a mask and another freak who holds a bunch of masks but doesnt wear them and so he tries over and over again to keep the moon from falling and then when he does it turns out theres children and a big green grassy plain inside of the moon so he plays some games with them and then everyone lives happily ever after

In an abandoned building, you run an obstacle course full of enemies trying to kill you. You don’t get a weapon. Instead, someone is constantly telling you how you’re dumb and fat and slow and adopted.

Then you do it again, but in a larger course with two people fighting over which one gets to be your friend, but you still don’t get a weapon and they’re both calling you dumb and fat and slow and adopted.

(Source: mylittlefangirl)

togamischoicemoney:

liquid-meth-addict:

I wonder how many will actually reblog…

What about asexual?

Did you seriously just set up a bunch of categories and give ‘straight’ its own and lump ‘bisexual’, ‘transgender’, and ‘intersex’ in the same one?

Do you even know what these words mean? They’re not even slightly related except as classes of people who get marginalized and all grouped together as “weird”. Like this.

What the fuck are you trying to imply here?

This is what it looks like to me:

• sexual orientation
• also sexual orientations but as an afterthought because they’re nonstandard
• skin color (ignoring the majority of humans)
• amount of body fat (again ignoring the majority of humans)
• a double-afterthought sexual orientation, a gender identity, and a physical characteristic (grasping at things that seem really weird in order to sound sufficiently inclusive)

I appreciate the sentiment, but calm down with the normative assumptions there.

(via thursdayangelsong)