

Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship - kylec
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i40/40sommers.htm

======
geebee
I think the problems Summers identified here are common to fields that are
very politically charged. I think that "scholars" are more likely to trumpet
questionable or even clearly false "research" - and their opponents are more
likely to angrily attack them for these mistakes.

Suppose that an immensely convenient theorem showed up in a math paper 10
years ago, that was later shown to be flawed. Well, I suppose math grad
students looking to solve problems would be tempted by this theorem, and might
erroneously use it for a while. But unlike the "rule of thumb" inaccuracy,
math doesn't tend to induce the same wish to believe. We may "wish" to believe
that a map can filled out with four colors, because it seems like a cool
concept, but we're not going to get angry when someone shows that our current
proof is false.

------
johnnybgoode
This is an important issue in and of itself, but I want to point out that such
problems are not limited to this field. See the comments at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=623420>.

~~~
frossie
_such problems are not limited to this field_

I agree - it seems to be particularly common in fields that touch, no matter
how obliquely, onto issues of public policy. On more than one occasion I have
tried to find a definitive reference for a claim and found nothing.

Now that evidence-based medicine has done so much for us, one can only wish
for evidence-based sociology. Admittedly, it is a bit harder...

------
tome
Interestingly I missed the author's name at the top, and read the whole
article assuming it was written by a man. I was surprised at the end to
discover the opposite.

~~~
lionhearted
I missed the name too, but I took a guess it was a woman. I was with a Jewish
friend today who'd mentioned that the jokes Sasha Cohen makes about Jews could
only be made by a Jew or there'd be backlash.

I've had some decent discussions with feminists in the past, and their work on
identity is really pretty interesting and valuable. But their numbers are
totally screwed up - you know that "1/4th of all women have been raped"
statistic? It's actually, "1/4th of women surveyed had sex that they wished
they hadn't". I'll guess just as many men have had sex they wish they hadn't
later.

I wonder why people cook up statistics to make their group's position look
worse than it is. Do they think it helps in legislation or funding or
education? The health people do it with STDs (greatly exaggerated risks), the
drug people do it hardcore (I don't do any intoxicants, but alcohol is way
more deadly and dangerous than half the illegal stuff in the USA), racial
issues, ethnic issues, gender issues, sexuality, immigration, labor, etc, etc.
It seems like tremendously many causes want to exaggerate their positions as
worse off than they are, or the effects of choosing the other side as much
worse than they are.

I think that'd be tremendously damaging to credibility in the long run, but I
guess not many people check up on the science they read in the paper or see on
the news.

~~~
onreact-com
"I wonder why people cook up statistics to make their group's position look
worse than it is."

It's due to the fact that such groups by the nature of their lower status
can't get through with their message. Nobody cared much for slavery in the US
until Uncle Tom's Cabin came out back then among other gruesome real life
accounts. The average plight of downtrodden peoples just gets overlooked.
Compare the global hunger crisis to the swine flu scare. Nobody cares for all
the food riots and tens of thousands dying of hunger daily etc. but people go
crazy about a few flu deaths.

So basically you need something shocking to get attention, whether it's a
statistic, story or whatever.

~~~
barry-cotter
_Nobody cared much for slavery in the US until Uncle Tom's Cabin came out back
then among other gruesome real life accounts._

UTC was propaganda, not a real life account. Slaves were much too valuable to
be treated in the way depicted in the book. Horrible treatment sure, but
what's in the book makes no sense on a commercial/economic level.

~~~
onreact-com
"UTC" was literature ;-) based on real people. My sentence was a little
misleading though: I meant that the other accounts were "real life".

You sound like a slavery supporter though. You should look up some history
books. Slaves were treated like cattle or pets basically. House slaves were
pets and plantation slaves were cattle.

~~~
sofal
Acknowledging that slaves had real economic value is in no way a declaration
of support for slavery. The fact that you can make such a jump in logic is
profoundly disturbing to me. Those sorts of conclusions take away from honest
discussion.

~~~
tayssir
I think he means that that argument sounds similar to the ones actually given
by slavery's supporters. I've heard an old economic argument that chattel
slavery is better than wage slavery (what we have now), because you treat
something you own better than what you merely rent.

(So an anarchonistic example is that a car you own will remain in better shape
than one you rent. That's actually not such a terrible argument, though of
course we'd reject it nowadays.)

That said, I don't personally know either way, and Wikipedia does mention that
_Uncle Tom's Cabin_ is popularly seen as propaganda. (I personally haven't
read the book, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were 'propaganda' in the
sense that it was biased and promoted a political point of view. Apparently,
before the Nazis, propaganda didn't have such bad connotations.)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin#Literary_si...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom%27s_Cabin#Literary_significance_and_criticism)

~~~
onreact-com
Exactly. This is the way slave holders in the south argued. You should read
the actual book. It's very moving, one of the greatest American literary
works. I read it in my first semester of American Studies.

------
limist
One has to wonder - given the individual and group mindset that promulgated
and then rationalized those feminist book(s), ideas, and arguments laden with
falsehoods and fabrications - what the reaction to this article would have
been had its author been a man.

------
blacktastic
It may be safe to say that a lot of scholarship, regardless of gender, is
flawed. That women do not wish to be publicly flogged is, perhaps, a tendency
of the gender.

Maybe contacting the author, first, was a better way to handle the situation?

Of course, the article author doesn't try to search her own flaws in her
approach.

~~~
jerf
"Maybe contacting the author, first, was a better way to handle the
situation?"

I disagree. Statements made in a public, academic context should be debated
and corrected in a public, academic context. This is perfectly appropriate;
indeed, taking it private may well be _in_ appropriate. This is the nature of
academia, and anything less is a disservice to the greater academic community
in question, who are shut out of a private conversation.

Obviously some professional courtesy is called for; such debate should not be
acrimonious, and sending a note to the originator of the debated items is
probably appropriate unless you know they can't miss it. But I'm not seeing
anything egregiously wrong with the author's approach or tone in this article.

Many of the corrections in question involve objective facts, too. While I am
keeping in mind I am seeing only one side of the story, I have a hard time
seeing what justifies responding to a debate about what the objective fact of
the matter is with _any_ sort of accusations or stonewalling. The March of
Dimes example seems pretty open-and-shut, for instance.

~~~
mgreenbe
It's standard procedure in academia---in CS, at the very least---to notify the
people you're correcting in advance. This ensures that they (a) know about the
problem, (b) are aware of your efforts and can comment directly to you, and
(c) can participate in the discussion that ensues when you publish.

------
inklesspen
Insightful.

But not Hacker News.

~~~
kylec
I swear, "not Hacker News" seems to be the overriding meme here on HN, and
it's getting old.

Sure this article's partially about feminism, but it's also about academic
integrity, which I think falls well under the purview of "Hacker News". Not to
mention the fact that CS and programming are often the focus of gender
difference issues by feminists.

~~~
maggie
CS and programming are actually /not/ often the focus of gender issues by
feminists.

The discussion on the gender-balance in said fields is brought up internally,
most of the time, if not always. The 'feminist' crowd (gender theorists,
women's studies academics, etc.) is honestly not that interested, or aware, of
our problems.

~~~
johnnybgoode
> The discussion...is brought up internally, most of the time, if not always.

You may be right, but I suspect the reason for the above has something to do
with the influence of feminists.

~~~
maggie
I doubt it.

That implies that the problems women face in computing (by being women)
historically and currently are myths and only exist if you think about 'em.

They aren't, and there's plenty of evidence to show otherwise. email me if you
really want a lit. review on the subject.

~~~
rewt66
Data point: My mother was a programmer back in the 1950s. She wrote numerical
programs that simulated missile trajectories... in octal. She thought it was
great when she got an assembler.

I don't recall her ever saying anything about discrimination on the job. The
thing she griped about was being told by a math professor that math was no
place for a woman.

Maybe there are some gating effects happening that steer women away from
trying technical fields? It seems to me that, within most software places, you
belong if you know your stuff. Nobody cares about your race, gender, religion,
sexual orientation, or other basis for "discrimination". We care if you can
code. (If you can't code, and got the job as a token person-of-that-
color/gender/sexual orientation, then we usually have a problem with that, but
that's not the same as bias against that color or gender or sexual
orientation.)

That's the way it's been almost everywhere I've ever worked, and I've been in
software for 25 years.

So what I'm trying to say is, there's almost always room for some
introspection, but maybe we're too hard on ourselves? Maybe the lack of women
in software isn't really the software guys' fault?

