Ist ja interesant
Paula, 09. 02. 08|13:FebJeden Freitag gibt es in Natures Chemieblog, The Sceptical Chemist, eine Serie die reactions heißt. Darin werden Chemiker eine Reihe fragen gestellt dazu warum sie Chemiker sind. Heute habe ich mal nachgezählt wieviel von welcher Sorte Geschlecht/Gender portraitiert wurden. Es waren 48 männliche Chemiker und 3 weibliche Chemiker. Was sagt uns das über die Blogauthoren die gleichzeitig Herausgeber von Nature Chemistry sind? Was sagt uns das über die “Chemiker mit Arbeitskreis”-Gruppe? Was sagt es uns darüber wo die Blogauthoren die Profile rekrutieren?
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Schlagwörter:Chemists, Gender, scientiae-carnival
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am 9. 02. 08 um 16:9
How many female chemists are there in the pool of portrayable chemists for The Sceptical Chemist?
am 9. 02. 08 um 17:9
I can think of plenty, way more than the 5 % they’ve got. Any chemist is portrayable.
am 10. 02. 08 um 1:10
Nielsson, chemistry has been having considerably more women for a time now. While the discipline does have a “leaky pipeline” problem, many countries have more women even at the most senior positions, e.g., 13% full professors in the USA.* But the Nature series also includes people at intermediate carrier stages, where it should be even easier to find more women.
*According to the American Chemical Society
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/educat.....women.html
am 11. 02. 08 um 12:11
Yes, it’s obvious that there are a lot more male than female chemists featured in the Reactions series. I don’t know the total numbers of chemists that we’ve asked to participate, or the gender breakdown of those, but the only criterion we have in terms of who gets featured, is those that say ‘yes’. A very large number of Reactions e-mails go unanswered (quite rude if you ask me, surely a quick polite ‘no’ would suffice), and a lot of people do say ‘no’. I would imagine we have asked more men than women, but not in the proportions ultimately featured on the blog.
I’d just like to point out that the editors who write for the blog are not the editors of Nature Chemistry, they are editors at Nature Publishing Group who are chemists or who have a strong interest in chemistry. The only editor recruited so far for Nature Chemistry is me – the rest should follow shortly. For most of my Sceptical Chymist life, I was working at Nature Nanotechnology – the other editors represent Nature Materials, Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Methods and Nature itself.
am 11. 02. 08 um 15:11
ouch. Thanks for pointing that out. I always get annoyed about 90% male invited speakers for conferences, which, I assume, has a old-boys-network factor. This, somehow, is even worse.
am 11. 02. 08 um 21:11
Thank you for answering my question Stuart. And sorry for the misrepresentation of the authors, I seem to have misunderstood.
I think your suggestion (at least thats the way I interpret it) that more women decline than men is a valid one. I can very well imagine that fewer want such personal attention as it might seem unserious or unprofessional. Depending on what your aim is with the feature, might it not be a good idea to ask specific types of people for reactions more? Again, I am not critizising you for the way you go about this feature, I just noticed last week that once again a man was featured where I would like to see more women. I absolutely love reading about chemists who are also women, because it makes me feel like “hey I can do that, too.”
That some people don’t even answer with a no is plain rude.
am 13. 02. 08 um 11:13
I also agree there should be more female chemists! :)
Mitch
am 18. 03. 08 um 1:18
I have often wondered why chemistry does not attract more women. I can’t help but think part of it has to do with how socialization into the field happens. Could it be that chemistry somehow self-selects obnoxious, domineering males? I may be one of those characters myself, but even I can barely tolerate my male colleague’s aggressive behaviour sometimes.