In March, I travelled to Auckland New Zealand for Kiwi Foo, a two-and-a-half day “unconference” where 150 participants from New Zealand and other parts of the world from a wide range of professional backgrounds self-organise the sessions. This includes people from technology companies, policy and community organisations, as well as academics . The idea behind Foo Camp is to bring together like-minded individuals who might otherwise not meet, and listen to one another and look for ways to connect in our common goal to make the world a better place.
In order to attend, one must be nominated by a previous Foo alumn from Kiwi camp or SciFoo from the UK. You pay for your own travel but all other costs, including food and lodging if you want it, are provided. When you accept the invitation, you nominate three keywords. Upon arrival, in a large hall filled with around three hundred people, each person stands up to introduce themselves by their name, their affiliation and their keywords, without elaboration. It took awhile but it was fun. My three keywords were: gender equity & diversity; science communication; sociology.
I initially felt uncomfortable about the idea of an unconference, a conference that is organised by participants:
“Unlike traditional conferences, an unconference is a participant-oriented meeting where the attendees decide on the agenda, discussion topics, workshops, and, often, even the time and venues. The informal and flexible program allows participants to suggest topics of their own interest and choose sessions accordingly. The format provides an excellent opportunity for researchers from diverse disciplines to work collaboratively on topics of common interest. The overarching goal for most unconferences is to prioritize conversation over presentation. In other words, the content for a session does not come from a select number of individuals at the front of the room, but is generated by all the attendees within the room, and, as such, every participant has an important role.”
Kiwi Foo turned out to provide a highly supportive discursive space. I was heartened that the Kiwi Foo website has an anti-harassment policy that is also emailed upon registration.
The unconference begins after the three-word introductions, where new Kiwi Foos are given first preference in putting up proposed talks and sessions. The main lounge area has several large posters up around the room with times and rooms available and you take the spot that best suits you. Most people do not propose talks but rather prefer to participate in discussions. If there are similar talks, the organisers will encourage the speakers to join together in the spirit of collaboration.
The talks were surprising in breadth of topic and sentiment. There were talks about new research and innovation; but there were also talks about how to redefine life after surviving cancer; some people nominated their own passion projects or their professional work; but others led discussions on how to enhance collaboration and not for profit work. Almost every talk was an interactive discussion or hands-on session, and few people used any PowerPoint.
Below you get a sense of the diversity of talks I’m going to tell you a little about some of the sessions I attended.
David Harvey, a former judge recently turned academic, talked about progressive online legislation. He is set to open a new academic centre on the topic and sought ideas and questions about the type of issues they might cover, as well as crowd-sourcing ideas for further funding. He talked about how slow the law has been to catch up on international patterns of internet use, and how online legal resources were arcane and difficult to navigate. I asked about how to bridge the digital divide given some socio-economic groups barely have access to reliable internet connections, including in Australia. Harvey said dedicated public spaces such as libraries and court houses should support access to online laws.
Another session on building stronger teams when creating social movements was well attended by people from various backgrounds. Shaun Hendy and Jess Weichler led the session. We sat on pillows on the ground and shared our experiences running volunteer groups. Other audience members talked about methods to leverage corporate sponsorship, and the limits of different approaches, as well as online tools to help connect potential volunteers to particular causes through skills, not just their passions. One suggestion that appealed to many people, including me, was Wellington’s Time Bank, where volunteers are “paid” in time credits, which they can use to hire someone else to volunteer for your cause.
A few of us discussed the challenges in keeping volunteers engaged, by knowing why they sign up and by validating their service in tangible (if not material) ways.
I talked about how one of my common experiences co-managing several scicomm groups is that people who volunteer do so for different reasons, and expectations will vary. One thing that has helped the groups I volunteer with is to set rules and be explicit on what it means to be a volunteer, as well as publicly state our values. For example, in an earlier incarnation of Science on Google+, three women of color moderators would exclusively respond to sexist trolling in our online science community. It helps that, with clear guidelines and new volunteer moderators, we can explicitly say our group is run by feminists, and know that our male colleagues will uphold this.
I liked the suggestion by another participant who said that showing appreciation of volunteers goes a long way, with someone else suggesting that “experiences” are given as trade and “payment.” For example, friends will donate activities (such as indoor rock climbing) that a volunteer group can offer their members, in exchange for other forms of volunteering.
Laura Campbell, a lawyer in her everyday life, and Mikee Tucker, founder of record label Loop, led a lovely discussion on how to make networking more diverse and accessible. A colleague talked about how Kiwi Foo was great, but very difficult for an introverted scientist such as himself. He suggested that organisers might consider putting on more one-on-one activities every evening. Games and structured conversation scenarios are more ideal for introverts.
Jane Strange talked about using co-design to tackle social policy problems. This involves not simply gathering data from community groups affected by particular issues, but also supporting community members to lead solutions. Using a set of posters, Strange discussed how two government agencies partnered with an NGO to better engage youth in South Auckland to increase the rates of youth-of-driving-age getting their licence. This area has a low-socioeconomic profile with high rates of youth crime and incarceration, however, many offences begin with minor issues, such as driving without a license. Getting a licence requires a relatively sound level of literacy and additional costs to qualify, and in rural areas where many families are struggling on social welfare, such things are luxuries.
Strange talked about driving licenses as a social justice issue. Eighty percent of youth cannot afford to pay driving-without-a-license fees of around $200. They are duped by the system into accepting community service, convinced by unscrupulous advisers that this is a good way to get work experience; however, this is a gateway into the criminal system. After another offence of driving-without-a-license, youth are less likely to get community service and instead are sent to jail, which exposes them to other criminal activities.
Not having a licence is also an economic justice issue: 70% of jobs in this area require a license. Strange talked about one young person who was qualified as a nurse but had to wait to be able to afford to go for their full licence, which meant working at a burger place for two years, while her qualifications went to waste.
Where driving-without-a-license is the norm, there are family consequences. One youth Strange worked with had been fined and subsequently lost his car. Now he continues to drive his mother’s car unlicensed, which jeopardises his mother’s car being impounded.
In this context, it became clear that the legal framework was failing youth and their communities.
Strange’s program connected youth with agencies, service providers and other community workers so they could together find priority areas during an initial workshop. Beyond traditional community consultation, youth would test their own recommendations by going back to their own communities and testing their proposals. Youth and community members were involved in evaluating and improving the new set of guidelines and public information campaign ideas. At the implementation phase, multiple ministers and a range of government agencies were linked together to find ways to keep the program running long term.
Strange noted that to collaborate in co-design policy, government agencies had to be willing to lose control. While this proves very challenging for policy-makers, the program so far suggests the results are far better than perpetuating the senseless imprisonment of disadvantaged young people.
Digital strategist, Dan West, discussed the impact of “behavioural economics” in tapping into gender equity themed advertisements. West noted that the UK ranks at around 7th place in the world amongst men who exercise, however it is in 17th place in terms of women who exercise. In comparison, Sweden ranks in 4th place for women. Market research shows that women in Britain refrain from exercise for a mix of reasons:
For their advertising campaign for This Girl Can UK, West’s team focused on fear of judgement. The campaign was mostly well received on social media, evidenced in encouraging tweets; however, there was some backlash. The advertisement was made by “mostly women” (though West did not elaborate further) and yet the public perceived that the opposite must be true. Some women perceived that the use of the word “girl” infantalised women. At the same time, West reports that the advertisement had success in increasing the number of women who exercised over a 1.5 year period.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toH4GcPQXpc
During questions from the floor, West addressed the misuse of behaviour economics and brand identity, such as Cadbury chocolates sponsoring an exercise campaign. In another case, Dove’s “feeling hot” campaign focused on women’s hairless underarms.
What I especially enjoyed about this walk was West’s open-ended reflection on the social justice “foot print” of advertising. He mused: what is the accountability for his field? He used the example of Benson & Hedges, a cigarette company now being held accountable for contributing to decades of poor health, spurred by heavy-handed and misleading advertising. West notes, however, that while the smoking giant has faced public scrutiny, the advertising agencies who worked with them have not.
Ethics and social justice in advertising – a fruitful dialogue that I’d like to pick up again some day.
Lessons from Kiwi Foo:
In accordance to Foo rules, I asked all participants photographed for permission to take pictures and write about their work on social media.
]]>Williams and Ceci write on CNN:
Many female graduate students worry that hiring bias is inevitable. A walk through the science departments of any college or university could convince us that the scarcity of female faculty (20% or less) in fields like engineering, computer science, physics, economics and mathematics must reflect sexism in hiring.
But the facts tell a different story…
Our results, coupled with actuarial data on real-world academic hiring showing a female advantage, suggest this is a propitious time for women beginning careers in academic science. The low numbers of women in math-based fields of science do not result from sexist hiring, but rather from women’s lower rates of choosing to enter math-based fields in the first place, due to sex differences in preferred careers and perhaps to lack of female role models and mentors.
While women may encounter sexism before and during graduate training and after becoming professors, the only sexism they face in the hiring process is bias in their favour.
Williams and Ceci’s data show that, amongst their sample, women and male faculty say they would not discriminate against a woman candidate for a tenure-track position at a university. Sounds great, right? The problem is the discrepancy between their study design, that elicits hypothetical responses to hypothetical candidates in a manner that is nothing like real-world hiring conditions, and the researchers’ conclusions, which is that this hypothetical setting dispels the “myth” that women are disadvantaged in academic hiring. The background to this problem of inequality is that this is not a myth at all: a plethora of robust empirical research already shows that, not only are there less women in STEM fields, but that women are less likely to be hired for STEM jobs, as well as promoted, remunerated and professionally recognised in every respect of academic life.
Williams and Ceci sent out an email survey to a randomised sample of over 2,000 faculty members in the USA in two maths-intensive fields where women are under-represented (engineering and economics) and two non-maths intensive fields where women are relatively better represented (psychology and biology). They had a 34% response rate, meaning their final sample was over 700 faculty. This rate of response is standard in many email surveys, but with this sort of study design, researchers need to critically examine and control for bias. In the social sciences, we know that people will participate in studies where they are 1) Given an incentive (usually paid); or 2) They have a personal stake or interest in the study.
Williams and Ceci say they have addressed self-selection bias of their sample by conducting two control experiments. In one, they sent out surveys to only 90 psychology faculty who were paid $25 for participation. They had 91% response rate (82 agreed to participate). Psychology not only has one of the highest proportions of women faculty relative to other fields, but this discipline uses gender as a central concept of study. That means that awareness of gender issues is higher than for most other fields. So including psychology as a control is not a true reflection of gender bias in broader STEM fields.
In another control study, Wiliams and Ceci surveyed engineering faculty by sending out hypothetical applicants’ CVs to 35 academics. This means that for a small sub-set of participants, they were evaluating material that is more like what we usually review when we are considering a candidate pool.
The rest of the sample – over 500 participants – were asked to rate three candidates based on narratives. This is not how we hire scientists.
In effect the study design does not simulate the conditions in which hiring decisions are made. Instead, participants self-selected to participate in a study knowing they’d be judging hypothetical candidates. While the researchers included a “foil” in their study design (one weaker male candidate) to contrast with two identical candidates who only varied in their gender, it is very easy to see from their study design that the researchers were examining gender bias in hiring.
Participants read a small vignette about three candidates where the gender pronouns (he and she) were varied; some were given stories about candidates who were single; some were single divorced mothers; some were married mothers; and vice versa for men. Some of the stories contained adjectives usually associated with men (independent, analytic), others with “feminine” characteristics (creative, kind). Participants were assessing candidates based on the narrative by a hypothetical hiring committee chair. They were then asked to rate their preferred candidate. Under these highly atypical conditions, the participants were found almost equally likely to hire women and men, and in some cases, some sub-groups say they would prefer to hire a woman.
Here’s the thing; we don’t hire scientists based on short narratives.
When we hire scientists, the first thing that is assessed is their CV. It is the CV that gets an interview; the interviewee sits before a panel; individual panellists make notes; the committee makes a decision together. The researchers claim that their control groups and their “consultants” have proved that these individual evaluations would not be any different than the way in which a panel makes hiring choices. To suggest this is ludicrous given that they don’t have data about how hiring panels make decisions. If they did have these data, their study would be a completely different piece of research.
The process of hiring any professional is the outcome of social interaction. Biases shape social exchanges. Biases also influence how we read and interpret CVs, so our previous social interactions, from education to our workplace setting, all have a bearing on how CVs are assessed. A panel involves deliberation, another social exchange that is influenced by pre-existing biases.
Various studies have used hypothetical CVs in an experiment and these demonstrate how gender and other biases influence outcomes. This includes a study showing that amongst male and female psychologists who assessed potential candidates, men and women prefer to hire a man, even if women have the same qualifications. In light of this previous research, it is most striking that in Williams and Ceci’s study, the paid control group of psychologists were used to show that gender bias is not present. The fact that the control group was paid for their time and opinion in a study by two psychologists, where no other participants were paid is most unusual. There is nothing wrong with paying participants (their time is valuable) but if only a small sub-set are paid and others are not, then we need to question why.
Regardless, other research, including another study published by PNAS, shows that academics would prefer to hire men over women for prestigious managerial positions. Moreover, even in the life sciences, which has a relatively higher rate of women, male scientists in elite research institutions prefer to recruit men over women.
This issue aside, the fact remains that Williams and Ceci do not have data to support how scientists rank potential candidates. They have produced data about how scientists respond to a study about gender bias in academia, when they can easily guess that gender bias is being observed. Academics already understand that gender discrimination is morally wrong and unlawful. After all, North American universities have anti-discrimination policies in place, and they offer some level of training and information about their institutional stance on sex discrimination.
Research shows that academics do not fully understand how unconscious gender bias informs their decision-making and behaviour. Unconscious bias plays out in everyday interactions within STEM environments, from comments that undermine women’s professionalism, to “jokes,” to broader institutional practices that exclude women. Unconscious bias has a damaging effect on women, who are continually undermined at every stage of their education and careers.
The same goes for other professionals and the public at large: people are not aware of their biases unless they are trained to understand and address these preferences, which are deeply ingrained into us through early childhood socialisation. The myth that girls and women can’t succeed in STEM is demonstrated through the Draw a Scientist Test, a process that measures how young children are conditioned to accept the image of a scientist as being a White older man in a lab coat. This latent stereotype is further reinforced in the way girls are discouraged from learning STEM, and it impacts on their subsequent success when following these career paths.
A wealth of literature has shown that women are disadvantaged in STEM. Women academics who are mothers are less likely to be hired over fathers; these fathers are offered an average $11,000 more than mothers as a starting wage. Women are disadvantaged at every step of the hiring process, including for the types of activities that boost CVs for tenure-track positions, such as Fellowships.
Other research shows that, even when presented with empirical data about gender inequality in STEM, men are overwhelmingly more likely than others to reject the existence of gender bias. White men in particular either reject outright that inequality exists, or they otherwise think that inequality impacts on men, and that women are conversely more favoured. Sound familiar? This body of research demonstrates just how deeply held the so-called “myth” of gender inequality runs. Williams and Ceci have managed to reaffirm the popular, but ill-informed, idea that gender inequality is over, even when their own data cannot prove such a feat, particularly since it runs counter to decades of research.
Nationally representative data shows that over a 30 year-period, it is White women who have benefited from affirmative action, and that women of colour have made minimal progress under these diversity policies. Even still, White women remain under-represented in STEM relative to White men, while women of colour scientists are even more marginalised and less likely to be hired for jobs. As for the minuscule proportion of women of colour who manage to secure employment, they are subjected to routine sexism and racism within scientific settings. Transgender women, especially women of colour, are further subjected to additional prejudices, including gender policing and stigma that further alienates and undermines their professionalism.
This is not the first time Williams and Ceci have published flawed results on gender in STEM, and it’s not the first time when they’ve completely ignored the real-world context in which women in STEM are battling to be hired, promoted and rewarded. This includes fighting not just sexism, but racism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and so on. I critiqued their last study, which similarly tried to argue that sexism in academia is dead. Their data and methods prove no such thing. Rather, their previous studies have set up a precedence that is continued in their current research, which shows that two White, tenured professors draw insubstantial conclusions about gender inequalities that are simply not supported by their findings.
Power and race matters: these White professors who have “made it” in academia do not see a major problem with the gender imbalance in STEM. Instead, they explain this inequity away by arguing that women are self-selecting not to enter academia, and that those who do subsequently accept the “motherhood penalty.” That is, that women choose to sacrifice their careers for child-rearing. Williams and Ceci do not recognise that institutional factors and unfair policies do not really give women a real “choice” about their family and professional responsibilities.
Elsewhere, I have shown that Williams and Ceci’s previous research is informed by a false narrative of individual choice. The same can be said for the present study. The researchers’ own biases lead them to believe that women and men belong to two discrete groups (making genderqueer and transgender scientists invisible). Similarly, they do not see that issues of intersectionality (the multiple experiences of inequalities faced by minority women) have a profound impact on gender inequity in STEM.
Ignoring race, sexuality and other socio-economic factors is a power dynamic: White, senior academics can pretend that race doesn’t matter, because racism does not adversely affect their individual progress. They can choose to believe that sexism is over because they have secured their tenure, even though they did so in a different climate to present-day pressures, where tenure is even tougher to find and early career researchers face precarious employment.
We must be ever-vigilant of how our biases contribute to inequality in STEM, and we must not accept abuse of power pandering to populist notions that we live and work in a so-called post-feminist, post-racial world. The evidence does not support such White patriarchal fantasies. Inequality has a concrete impact on the working lives of many women scientists, and this is felt most acutely by women of minority backgrounds. Rather than pretending the problem does not exist, let’s work together to eradicate gender inequality.
Edited to Add: Some excellent posts analysing Williams & Ceci below. I’ll add more as I find them.
Top image: photos adapted by Zuleyka Zevallos from these Creative Commons (2.0) sources:
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Lee notes that talking about Mars in terms of colonisation is not simply an issue of semantics – for example using “settlement” instead of colonising. Rather, media narratives unquestioningly champion rich White men’s ideas about what Mars travel should mean: “we don’t have to be stuck on Earth!” The narrative is being framed around “saving” humanity. (See a Storify of Lee’s discussion for further context.)
Lee asks: saving from what, whom, and why? And in this re-imagining of humanity’s salvation, who is left behind? Who does the dangerous, under-paid work of building new colonised spaces? In short, what have we learned from history about colonisation? It is rooted in exploitation and inequality. On Twitter, Lee writes:
“When I hear scientists discuss “for the good of humanity” I check who is talking and if they listen to “others.” History AND Contemporary events have demonstrated how often people will exploit and harm ‘others’ when diverse ppl cant inform policy… If Mars will be better place (where the wealthy are clamoring to) & earth is the place to be “stuck”, then WHO is stuck & w/ what resources… In human history there’s a profound diff in exploration, recon, even trading with other peoples vs Imperialism, conquering & colonization…Thing is, when Some of us hear Colonization, Enterprise Expansion, New wealth acquisition, we have a VERY different Movie trailer playing”
Lee is clear that space exploration is not the problem; she is questioning the context of talking about Mars as a place to colonise, as a way to escape problems on Earth, which have arisen as a result of colonial practices in the first place.
Lee demonstrates that White male entrepreneurs encourage the public to give up on our responsibilities on Earth, both environmentally and socially. They do so in ways that mirror the colonisation of Indigenous cultures.
Lee shows that this Mars narrative is exclusionary. The reaction to her discussion amplifies this exclusion.
White male space enthusiasts have been arguing back at Lee on Twitter, saying that Mars represents an opportunity to start over; to get social justice right. They tell her that if she continues to be “negative,” she will miss out on the opportunity to engage with the future of space science, because the public will turn off her. One White man even said to Lee the equivalent of: We need women like you on Mars to procreate! (As if women’s special place in this brave new world is solely to reproduce, rather than her scientific practice and the leadership she is demonstrating.)
Former NASA engineer Homer Hickam was one of the men who dismissed Lee’s conversation as “silly.” Hickam is someone Lee says she looked up to (Hickam’s life story inspired the movie October Sky starring Jake Gyllenhaal). She tried to engage him in a discussion about why the points of view of people of colour (POC) matter. She discussed colonialism and White male privilege. For example, his views as a White man dominate STEM, but her views as woman of colour are dismissed.
Hickam responded that he is proud that his ancestors had social privilege because that means they were successful and earned their place in colonised spaces. He applauds manifest destiny more than once. He evoked a Native American ancestor to justify his racist comments (whilst celebrating the tenacity of his White ancestors to colonise). Hickam derided Lee’s concerns as a fellow scientist because she is a woman of colour. He then blocked her, effectively shutting down the conversation about inclusion. As a senior figure in STEM with greater social power, Hickam proves Lee’s argument, that only White men’s views are allowed respect in STEM.
Lee notes that if we can’t get the conversation about diversity and inclusion right, here and now – then how can we ever hope to restart afresh elsewhere?
Exploration can happen in many ways, and these do not necessarily have to involve exploitation, enslavement, dispossession, rape, genocide, removal of children from their communities, being forced into missionary settlements, forced to convert religion and violently made to assimilate. Colonialism only happens through violence – including all the methods mentioned, which have happened to Indigenous groups around the world. This colonial violence continues in the present day.
Indigenous Australians were the first to migrate out of Africa 75,000 years ago. Their population was decimated when Europeans arrived in Australia in 1788. The colonisers declared Australia “terra nullius” (uninhabited land). Indigenous Australians, like all other Indigenous groups, have suffered violence and inequalities ever since. In fact, right now, the Australian Government is forcing 150 Indigenous communities off their ancestral lands in Western Australia. This will make 12,000 Aboriginal people refugees in their own country.
Why is this happening? Because the Government says living in these lands is not economically viable and wanting to live there is a “lifestyle choice” the Government does not support. More to the point, these communities are set up on land that is rich in natural resources. Other parts of Western Australia are just as remote, yet business and Government made them viable so mining towns could be set up.
So the point Lee makes about colonial narratives is valid and pressing: rich White men make decisions that adversely affect minorities. They talk about these decisions in ways that replicate historical violence, and in so doing, they compound inequalities happening on Earth. Lee is saying: why would Mars be any different if Indigenous and POC perspectives are being forced out of discussions and policy making?
Imagine you are a young Indigenous child intrigued about space. Indigenous groups, including in Australia, already have many sacred stories about the stars that have influenced science. Indigenous Australians may be “the world’s oldest astronomers.” What a great way to connect Indigenous youth with STEM careers! But now imagine they see these media stories, where White men conceive of space travel in colonial terms, while at the same time they are living through their communities being pushed off their lands. They also see only a few brave people of colour, like Lee, standing up to big-name White men in STEM, while these leaders and other so-called “allies” are calling this Black scientist “silly.”
We have so few Indigenous groups in STEM as it is; the numbers in astronomy can be counted in one hand when we look at gender breakdowns in different locations.* So why would these minorities want to join a STEM profession if White scientists want to assert their right to ignore historical violence? STEM pushes out minorities in many ways; this is just one example.
Language is not benign. Language matters for diversity and inclusion, as do the ideas informing our choice of words, and the stories we choose to weave, and those we ignore.
Lee’s Storify only covers the first day of comments; Lee fended off racist push-back for a couple of days. I encourage you to go to Lee’s Twitter feed to read how she further connects her argument to discussions about diversity in STEM.
Lee’s key point is on the importance of framing STEM stories in a more inclusive manner. It’s not just words; it’s the thinking behind these words that also influences how we teach and learn science; it’s how existing policies are maintained; it’s how some voices continue to shout down Others.
For a complementary perspective, see science artist Glendon Mellow’s tweets, where he uses an art metaphor. The culture, training and perspective of the first artists and architects sent to Mars will shape how the new world is designed. If that view is White, male and framed around colonialism, that will be reflected in the infrastructure.
The conversation we need to have: how can we learn from Lee’s arguments to make science more inclusive? How might we use this perspective in our teaching and advocacy? How can we use post-colonial theory (study of how history of colonial oppression shapes modern-day inequalities) to support diversity and inclusion?
On inclusion of Indigenous groups in STEM:
Read my other posts on Indigenous Australians:
About the ongoing impact of colonialism in Australia:
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https://instagram.com/p/yT6xnGG-26/?taken-by=othersociology
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]]>A new study by Dr Corinne Moss-Racusin and colleagues has analysed the public’s comments in response to a prominent study on gender bias in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). The researchers find that men are more likely to post negative comments in response to scientific findings about sexism in STEM careers. To provide a flipside illustration, I share some examples of what it is like to be a woman moderator of a large, international science community on Google+. This case study will illustrate the recurring arguments used to invalidate the science on inequality in STEM. These arguments are focused on biological (mis)understandings of gender; stereotypes of what motivates men and women; and a desire to police the boundaries of science. Denying that sexism exists is a common tactic to invalidating the science on gender bias in science, and attacking the social sciences is concurrently used to discredit findings on inequality, as well as support the idea that inequality does not exist in STEM.
In a study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly, Moss-Racusin and colleagues analysed 831 comments in the New York Times website, Discover Magazine blog, and the IFLS website, all of which reported on a highly cited and reputable study on the gender bias in faculty hiring committees. The original study was published in PNAS in 2012, and was also authored by Dr Moss-Racusin leading an interdisciplinary team of researchers. The PNAS study was chosen because it was the one science story on gender that gained the most online comments in 2012. The three websites were chosen for analysis because they have a high public following and because all three included a link to the original study, which the public could read freely should they have further questions on the findings. The PNAS study involved an experiment where biology, chemistry and physics professors at research-intensive universities evaluated job applications for a lab manager position. They were presented with identical CVs with either a man or a woman’s name. The participants rated the male applicants more favourably along every measure and offered them a higher starting salary, even though the women’s CVs had the exact same information.
In the present study, the researchers find that 433 comments were negative. That is, the commenters refuse to believe the findings on gender bias. Men are more likely to do so. There are eight types of negative responses, that draw on a range of justifications from biology to social conventions. Men especially used subjective and sexist observations about women’s supposed innate inability to succeed in science. Ideas that prevailed included “women get pregnant and leave their jobs!” Women’s interests are also cast as fundamentally different to men’s:
I think that a proportion of the gender divide can be accounted for by a division in interests.
Men also evoked ideas of personal choice, such as arguing men are “hungrier” for success and work harder than women, or that men work harder in STEM because women push them to make more money. (Men would not be sexually competitive, they argue, if they didn’t succeed.) I note that in all these discussions, “men” and “women” are discussed as two discrete groups, implicitly drawing on biological narratives of gender. Transgender and alternative genders don’t feature; racial and other socio-cultural differences are not considered; and heterosexism prevails. That is, the discussion is centred on the presumption that everyone is heterosexual, and that all women and men want the same things. In the study, men are more likely to deny that inequality exists, or conversely they blamed women for inequality and said that gender bias targets men (“I’ve experienced it in the opposite way so far.”). These men evoke a general discontent with affirmative action laws, or they raised other unrelated social issues as examples of “bias against men,” such as divorce laws and custody of children, and saying women get “the most stuff.”
Men are more likely to refute the science findings on inequality by stating that they work in STEM (75% of men’s comments). In comparison, women shared personal and detailed stories about the gender bias they’d experienced at work, but only 25% justified their opinions by saying they work in STEM. Women shared stories like:
Speaking as a female computer geek, who seems to be unemployed twice as often as my male counterparts – YES. Gender bias definitely still exists. My instructor told me he generally believes women are bad at math but they’re great if they don’t catch you staring at their butt! Whatta jerk!’’
The gender difference here is that men use blanket statements about biology and innate differences, as well as using personal opinion (society is biased against men) to refute scientific evidence about gender bias. Conversely women use personal anecdotes to illustrate the scientific findings. The first strategy – to deny the science on inequality – is used largely by men to invalidate science on sexism in support of the status quo. The other strategy, used mostly by women, supports the science using personal experiences of bias to challenge the status quo. Neither approach is scientific as personal anecdotes are not science, but the first approach rejects science evidence, saying things are fine the way they are, while the other approach embraces the science, to say things are unfair and should change.
One strategy that men used to invalidate the PNAS study was to establish themselves as a science expert, by saying they work in STEM. Men also critiqued social science but did so on moral grounds and using emotive language. Social science is often categorically excluded from the umbrella term of STEM. Social scientists rarely use this phrase to describe their practice. While sociology was set up by our early founders to mirror the practices of the natural sciences (for example Durkheim), more recent traditions are expressly critical of the natural sciences for contributing to the marginalisation of women, minorities and vulnerable populations (Foucault is a key critic). Nevertheless, social science is very much a scientific practice – we offer valid methodologies for the critical study of society. We collect data and use established theories to draw conclusions about the social influences on behaviour. Unlike the men who refute the science on gender bias in science, we do not use emotional arguments to dismiss scientific studies. We draw on our training and credible peer reviewed science studies. I run several science communities, and no single issue (other than climate change) draws more heated debate than posts about social science studies on science inequality. I present examples of posts that I’ve authored, all of which draw on social science research, as well as a couple of other examples from other social scientists and non-social scientist women who write about inequality. The common denominator is that whenever inequality in science is raised as an issue, this is immediately met by cries of bias, almost exclusively by men. When the authors are women scientists, we encounter even more push back.
Science on Google+ is an ever-growing community with over 503,300 members, most of whom are general members of the public with an interest in science. We also have host a Google+ page with over 521,200 followers, many of whom are scientists. Even with a slightly higher following, our page rarely descends into personal attacks, possibly because our followers are predominantly science practitioners who use Google+. Our community generates many excellent discussions as we have practising scientists who share their posts, but posts about gender almost always become unruly.
Consider a post where I discussed the Royal Society’s own data that showed gender inequality in their science fellowship program. When I shared this post on Science on Google+ it did not take long for a man to angrily cry that I was asking for special treatment for women simply by writing about women’s experiences of inequality.
In another post which I authored for STEM Women, social science is also called into question. I had presented a scientific critique of a study published in the New York Times. The study argues sexism is dead in academia. I showed that the study’s methodology was flawed. In the Google+ discussion, a man argues that my analysis (of a social science study) is biased because of my sources (also social science studies). Another male mathematician posted the original NYT article and used it to attack psychology as a science, but he also offers his personal experience saying that the authors (both psychologists) are correct in their assessment that there is no sexism in academia. In these examples, we see how social science is malleable to the public and non-social scientists alike, who either attack the study based on its argument (that gender bias exists) or discipline. Social science findings are welcome when they match someone’s world-view that inequality does not exist.
In a post I wrote for STEM Women, I discuss data published by the Nobel Prize committee, showing that less than 3% of laureates have been women. Again, men (and some women) cry foul. One man does this by calling into question my scientific credentials, even though he is not a scientist. He wants to argue that women may simply not be good enough to win Nobel Prizes but he has no data to back this up.
True scientists would not discard the politically-incorrect possibility of intellectual differences out of hand. (My emphasis)
I have presented scientific data. He has presented a “possibility” that the science is wrong and argued it with great emotion (see the thread). He persists in arguing that I and my fellow women science moderators (who are biologists) are simply being “politically correct.” He then goes on to copy paste a series of statements from Wikipedia. As it turns out, he is inadvertently referencing a series of social science studies. He tries to dismiss the social science studies he doesn’t like, by using other social science studies he thinks support his argument that women are inferior to men. The problem is he hasn’t actually read these studies and he is not trained to read them critically. I am. So are my fellow women scientists. As we show, not only has he cherry picked his examples, but the studies actually validate my original argument about inequality in science. Other men show up and give the predictable examples of “My wife has a PhD…” Personal examples are used to try to discredit the science.
Another post by diversity specialist and lecturer, M. Laura Moazedi, on the science of confirmation bias (how stereotypes are used to justify outcomes by men and women) leads a man to argue she is being biased.
What about confirmation bias of “scientists” searching at all costs the gender inequality in stereotypes, while ignoring biology?
Note the quote marks, which are used to discredit social science. The fact that the study is a piece of social science research rather than biological science is also used as a rationale to discredit the findings (even though it is a study of social behaviour) . There are many more examples I can give from our community. (I will do a follow up post on how I manage these types of arguments.) The point I want to illustrate here is that when women speak up about science inequality, the science is dismissed. The responses are gendered in other ways, however, as our male colleagues generally face less push back. Nevertheless, resistance still rears its head when a woman scientist speaks up.
Take this post by a male moderator, who speaks up about the level of sexism in our community. Most of the comments are positive until a woman moderator, speaks up to confirm her experience. A man promptly begins to argue against another group we co-moderate, STEM Women, saying that it reflects how sexism affects men more than women.
the fact that +STEM Women on G+ exists shows women have sexism problems against men, you are asking for the opposite.
He then argues women are biologically inferior and unable to join the military (in his eyes). The thread rages like this for a couple of days. Compare these two posts about Dr Maryam Mirzakhani’s Fields Medal win. The Fields Medal is colloquially referred to as the “Nobel Prize for Mathematics.” Dr Mirzakhani is the first woman in the award’s history to be recognised. One community member simply posts the news of the win. The second comment is by a man commenting on Dr Mirzakhani’s looks. Another male community member calls out the commenter, asking if he’d make such a comment about a man. I step in as moderator and remind the original commenter about our guidelines that expressly ban sexist comments. A different man jumps in saying:
Zuleyka Zevallos your comments offend me. There was nothing derogatory in Vincents comments, neither was it sexist. You have taken it upon yourself to portray yourself as the almighty of the science discussion community group by suggesting that his free speech was not allowed. This may have been handled better by yourself had you possibly been complimented about your looks, i dont hold out for that compliment or the stepping down from your high horse. #neigghhhh (My emphasis)
I am chastised for enforcing our community rules, in my role as moderator, and I receive a sexist comment to boot. This discussion goes on for two days with my fellow women moderators jumping in. The thread only quietens down when a male moderato repeats our rules against sexism. In a second post about the Fields Medal win, this time written by me on behalf of our moderator team, it takes only 15 minutes for a sexist comment to appear. In almost all of these cases, it is men who deny the science or who make sexist comments. These are, by and large, White men who are heavily invested in protecting the boundaries of science to remain the exclusive domain of (White) men. Writing about inequality in science is critiqued for being “biased against men,” and social science is dismissed for not being biology, and when this tactic fails, other social science is evoked to (erroneously) discredit the original post.
On her personal Google+ feed, astronomer Dr Katie Mack noted that her large public following loudly revolts when she publishes on issues about equality in science. She notes that her followers shout to have her “focus on the science.” She argues this makes little sense since science is practised by human beings; therefore scientific practices impact on scientists.
So, no, I won’t just “focus on the science” at the expense of actual human scientists. I will keep talking about the ways we can make scientific culture better and more welcoming to anyone who has a contribution to make.
The idea that women should not talk about inequality in science dominates public discussions of science. This happens in science communities such as ours, which expressly state that sexism is grounds for being banned. Women who speak up about inequality are accused of bias or they are otherwise targeted for personal attacks. This includes the women moderators, who are practising scientists with PhDs and a strong knowledge of the science on gender bias. It also happens to women scientists writing about inequality on their personal social media profiles. A rowdy sub-group, largely men, want to read about science and talk about how much they love science without hearing about what it means to practice science. They want to follow women experts but they demand that these women not discuss issues of inequality as a scientific concern. They want to be members of science communities without having to see posts on inequality, even when the community expressly supports such posts. In all these cases, simply ignoring posts about inequality is not enough. Men feel a need to vehemntly disagree with science on inequality even when they have no data and when they do not understand the science. Why? As I’ve previously shown, the sociology of science shows that people are more likely to speak up against science issues in which they have an ideological vested interest. The science about inequality in science is polarising because it is tied to personal identity and deeply-held values. Some men want to imagine science as being uncontaminated by women. If inequality does exist, surely women are inviting it, by virtue of their biology, by their choices, by their mere existence. Women should just shut up and do science. Their science should be seen, but their experiences not heard. Above all, though, these women cannot be allowed to write about the science of inequality in science because this is an encroachment on White men. It goes against nature that women don’t simply accept inequality. It’s unscientific to want to address inequality using science. It’s biased for women to talk about gender bias. It’s censorship to remind people not to objectify women scientists and to stick to community rules when talking about science. Or so the logic of sexism goes.
The research by Moss-Racusin’s team presents a framework for thinking about why men react negatively to the science of gender bias in STEM. Being able to educate the public and STEM professionals to recognise personal gender bias is the first important step in making STEM a more equitable space. Moss-Racusin and her colleagues argue:
“Simply put, women are likely to perceive potential personal gain from research that may ameliorate men’s privilege, whereas men may believe that such research can only harm them. More broadly, because people are often more receptive to information that confirms their existing worldviews… it may be critical to understand participants’ pre-existing attitudes toward gender bias and diversity when creating effective interventions.”
In better understanding the types of arguments used to sustain gender inequality, educators, managers and policy makers can begin to target attitudes that undermine gender inclusion in STEM. I have shared some examples of the issues I encounter as a science moderator with the aim of further illustrating the flipside of Moss-Racusin and colleagues’ findings – what it means to be a woman dealing with these comments. I have more to say on this issue and will return to it again. One take away message for now is that, despite the problems, it is worth speaking up on these issues. Moss-Racusin and colleagues’ study shows that comments on science sites are largely positive. Despite the negative experiences, continuing to discuss the social science on gender bias in science is important. First, because without social science data, the public would bicker about inequality using solely subjective examples based on dangerous stereotypes that undervalue women’s contributions. Second, while there is plenty of evidence that gender inequality in STEM is not based in biology, we still need to keep elevating this science precisely because the message is still not getting through. A very vocal sub-group of people, most of whom are men, want to see women stay quiet on this issue. They see bias in social science but they see no bias in themselves. Why they feel a need to police the boundaries of science is central to moving forward. By crying out that scientists should just “focus on the science,” they are actually calling for the maintenance of White men’s dominance in science. Lack of diversity in STEM impedes innovation. So, in fact, while these men disguise their bias as concern for science, they are in fact saying that they don’t want science to answer new questions. In a nutshell, by protecting men’s perceived dominance in science, they are, in fact, advocating for scientific stagnancy. How much can one really love science if they are heavily invested in gate keeping scientific inclusion, thereby ensuring that new ideas will fail to flourish?
To read more about how social science can be used to debunk gender myths in science, see my post, “Science Inequality in the News: Avoiding Dangerous Gender Narratives in STEM,” in Minority Postdoc.
Top image: photos 1 and 2 via Flickr.
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]]>The Royal Society was silent for a couple of days after its list of fellows list was made public, despite a large outcry by the scientific community on social media and opinion columns in the media. The Society President, Sir Paul Nurse, finally announced an investigation a couple of days after the fact. The question is: why did the Society wait until it was made public to assess their program?
I want to stress that while I’m using the Royal Academy’s Fellowship outcomes as a case study, the issue I am illustrating is the reactionary treatment of gender bias in all fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). The point here is to tease out institutional patterns and to make the case that institutional approaches are needed to address gender inequality. While this point may seem obvious, the fact is that inequality in science, as with other spheres of social life, is still treated as a surprise. This is because, on the whole, organisations (and society in general) remains reactionary to addressing gender inequality. Diversity is an afterthought, when it should be a proactive and ongoing project at the organisational and societal levels.
This is the first in a series of articles I’m writing on why the scientific community, inclusive of various disciplines, needs to re-examine its position on the problem of inequality in STEM. The picture I am building up is one of methodological rigour and interdisciplinary collaboration in order to better work towards gender inclusion.
The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge has made great contributions to gender equality in science, having hosted two annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thons, which encourage scientists to write Wikipedia entries about women scientists. This project has been adopted by other universities and science organisations such as the Australian Academy of Science’s Wikibomb. Yet when it comes to other organisational practices, there’s a long way to go.
No women have served as president for the Royal Society and only five percent of fellows at the beginning of the year are women. These facts feed into a broader problem of everyday sexism, where interpersonal and organisational practices validate broader gender inequalities at the societal level.
It’s great to host activities to promote gender diversity, but if an organisation’s structure and policies don’t actively reflect gender diversity, organisational commitment to gender equality has limited practical impact. Organisations like the Royal Society need to lead by example. Gender equality is obviously important given examples such as the Wiki hackathons and special awards such as the Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship, but conflicting patterns within the Royal Academy reflect a broader problem in STEM.
As Zoology Professor Ben Sheldon noted on Twitter, having compiled data for the first two graphs below, the Royal Society did not respond to his public requests for a breakdown of Fellowship applicants. Sheldon’s graphs clearly show a worrying trend where less women are progressing through the Fellowship process (graphs via Katie Mac).
Some researchers defended the statistical trend arguing that the 2014 data are an anomaly. For example Chemistry PhD student Rebecca Murphy argues that the number of women fellows “has remained broadly stable over the last five years.” Physics Professor and Royal Society council member Athene Donald similarly argues, “as previous years’ data show, I don’t think the Royal Society can be said to be permanently showing deep prejudice towards women applicants.”
Swedish Professor of Mathematics David Sumpter, however, argued that the statistical trend was indeed worrying, and that “gender bias in academia can easily be created even when each career stage appears to be fair according to a statistical test.” He takes a long-term view of academic careers, focusing on different stages of recruitment using a binomial distribution (probability of success over a sequence of events). He shows that doing a statistical test of overall trends can obscure the statistical inequalities at each stage of academic application process. He writes:
“Doing a statistical test at one stage might show that that particular stage was fair, but it is more or less meaningless when done isolation. [Royal Society’s Edward] Hinds admits this at the end of his article, but does not spell out that each stage can appear ‘fair’ while producing an unfair outcome….
And that brings me to the Royal Society’s appointment of 2 out of 43 research fellows. Given the 21% female applicants each year, this was obviously statistically significant and I believe a poor decision. As Richard Mann argues in his blog post it might be reasonably considered as a statistical blip. Ben Sheldon provided statistics over the last 6 years giving the proportion of female appointments as 24%, 30%, 17.5%, 19.4%, 17.1% and 4.7%. The average is 18.78%, which given 21% female applicants gives a P value of about 0.4. Not biased against women, but hardly evidence that the Royal Society is helping women at this critical time in their career. More worrying is if we only take the last four years. Now the average is 14.68%. And the P value for this? About 0.2. Just around the level we might expect in my model for an institution trying to balance itself above statistical significance. While I am sure the Royal Society take this issue extremely seriously, I am afraid that these types of statistics do not look good.” [My emphasis]
So, to reiterate: taking the raw numbers, fluctuations this year may not look so bad if we compare them over a short period. Yet if we take a longitudinal approach, and examine inequality in stages, rather than simply from one year to the next, then gender bias becomes even more pronounced. What explains this? To get to the answer, we need to take into consideration various complex and interlocking institutional processes.
Elsewhere, I have made the point that competition for Fellowships mask institutional barriers that women face along way. This includes career and training opportunities that are not easily accessible to women due to life circumstance (such as family responsibilities), as well as other experiences of discrimination along a woman’s educational path. There are general issues that affect all women broadly, such as the effect of stereotypes and sexual harassment. There are even more issues that affect minority women specifically, such as sexism coupled with racism and homophobia.
The Royal Society would have known the winners well ahead of the announcement. It’s a competitive process but it is not a lucky draw. There are standard procedures and several steps that participants undertake. Why is the Society not monitoring its own procedures to ensure gender participation is more equitable at every stage of the process? As I will show, this means not only monitoring the Fellows’ application progression, but what it is doing to ensure that enough women are receiving adequate support leading up to the application.
The Society has publicly stated that they are disappointed by the 2014 figures as if they came as a surprise. This should not be the case. Like many gender issues in science, organisations do not critically examine their practices unless the public complains loudly enough. This is simply not good enough. Gender and equity issues require ongoing evaluation and commitment, and not simply reactions set against scandal.
Gender diversity cannot be taken for granted. In science, we continue to hold onto the myth of meritocracy. Some of the discussion on social media reflects this: perhaps not enough women applied; maybe the quality of women applicants was simply not high calibre this year; maybe women should be more proactive (read: “aggressive”) in pursuing a Fellowship. This is yet another example of the onus being placed on women to monitor their own progress. These types of arguments fail to see how women are being asked to participate in a structure that is biased against them at every stage of their education and career progression.
Science is not an even playing field. It never has been. The obstacles that women and minorities face are there not because they aren’t working hard enough, but because systems perpetuate inequality. Like the broader “leaky pipeline” problem, Fellowships need to be reviewed actively and routinely, not after the fact, but as an ongoing process. Policies may be inclusive on paper, but not in practice, especially if problems are not being actively monitored, evaluated and acted upon.
Male postgraduate students easily navigate academic bureaucracies with stronger support by their supervisors relative to women. Selection panels have been shown to be biased against women scientists even when they have the same qualifications and experience as men, and even when they put in the same number of work hours as men. Married academic men with children rise up quickly through academic ranks while their women counterparts are left behind. Even the public profile of White male scientists is more valued than women and minorities. These trends are not unrelated and they collude to prevent from women being treated as equal candidates in Fellowships and in the job market more broadly.
At every step of the way, before applicants have even started to look for Fellowships, women are already disadvantaged. Organisations need to own the responsibility of inequity. It’s not just one oversight one year; it’s a series of decisions that encourage men while obstructing women’s participation. The Royal Society is only one example where one “anomaly” actually reinforces a system of inequality. Training, education, policy and institutional reform are needed not just to lift numbers next year, but to put women on a stronger path of lifelong career success.
I have a backlog of blog articles, so you’re going to read two from me over the next couple of days on this same issue and more in coming weeks. In part, I am motivated by moving beyond the cyclical arguments the sciences engage in when it comes to gender inequality. It seems that when we make some progress in one area, we take another step back elsewhere. This year alone, one science publication caused an uproar with sexist imagery, only to be followed by similar events not once but twice a few months later (with transphobia additionally thrown in the third instance). Important online discussions addressing sexual harassment have led to positive offline, cross-disciplinary engagement (such as with the study led by Professor Kate Clancy). Yet in between, high-profile science elders have engaged in incendiary sexist attacks on women, while ongoing issues in tech single women out for abuse.
From humanities to life sciences; from social to computer science; from pure to applied fields; gender inequalities are not easily overcome with a tunnel vision view. That is, we need to have a better grasp on why data collection on gender dynamics matter. We need to commit to working together, across disciplines, to address inequality. Above all else, we need to move away from individual-level explanations.
By thinking individual women can simply beef up their Fellowship applications, we miss the bigger picture – that is, how institutional processes affect different groups of women at different stages. We need to better understand the hurdles that stand in women’s way before they even consider applying for Fellowships (for example), and what happens to women at different points in their careers which make success so much harder.
It’s not just a numbers game – as Sumpter shows with the Royal Society, data can obscure patterns if we are not looking deeply enough. Even then, the data can tell you the outcome – it can show, yet again, that inequality exists, but statistical analyses alone cannot tell you why. As I will show in my next post, the way in which we collect, analyse and interpret data on gender dynamics in STEM needs to change.
We are all, in every science and tech field, complicit in gender inequality as long as we continue to allow the conversation to be shifted away to red herrings. The fact that gender inequality exists in STEM is a fact. What it means in different disciplines, and how to address the nuances of inequality is where we now need to focus our attention by also taking into consideration race, sexuality, class, disability and other socio-economic measures (this is the theory of intersectionality – more on this at a later time).
We are beyond the point of looking to individual women to raise their voices louder for help, because blaming women for inequality is a tactic that does not work. Whether its woeful outcomes in Fellowships, or pay discrepancies amongst faculty, or representation at conferences, or publications, or some other measure – these are all symptoms of institutional damage. We need to look to the causes and own them as a collective problem that requires collective effort. Enough with ducking our heads in the sand and hoping no one notices inequality. Enough with the surprise and the reactionary promise to do better next time. A stronger appraisal of longitudinal trends of inequality and long-term, proactive measures are the remedy. Let’s clean up this sick system in STEM, instead of making excuses for it.
The Wikipedia page for #YesAllWomen, a record of an anti-sexism online protest movement, is being edited to make it “less misandrist.” This Wiki page documents the Twitter hashtag that is being used internationally by women to share their experiences of sexual harassment, abuse and discrimination following the Isla Vista mass shooting in America. Some men are using this tag to listen and support women, but predictably, others are abusing it to hurt women and argue that the hashtag is “sexist against men.” The Wiki edits matter because Wikipedia has a massive problem with sexism. These edits reflect the very issues of gender violence, intimidation and power that the #YesAllWomen hashtag is trying to address.
Between 8% to 13% of Wikipedia editors are women. The Wikipedia Foundation recognises the public encyclopaedia is skewed towards men. It seeks new ways to entice newcomers, because both recruitment and retention of women is an ongoing challenge. Specifically, its surveys reveal “systemic bias” in the “average Wikipedian,” who is an English-speaking male form a Christian-majority country, in a developed nation in the Western hemisphere, technically inclined, well educated, aged 15–49 and employed as a white-collar worker or they are otherwise a student. For a universal open access project, Wikipedia fails on every measure of diversity: geographic, linguistic, racial, sexuality, economic, and of course gender. There are projects set up to address these short-comings, but the problems are very far from being resolved. The issues are socio-cultural, rather than technical.
Many of Wiki women have spoken out about how their entries are often edited by men in malicious ways, using sexist, racist, homophobic and violent language (trigger warning). Wikipedia finds this is driven by its “conflict-oriented culture” which forces women to leave as they are treated aggressively by male editors. A Wiki study reports:
“Unexpectedly, we find that female editors are more concentrated in areas with high controversy… and are more likely than males to draw corrective actions from fellow editors… In summary, the available data indicate that female editors experience more adversity than male editors in all the areas that we studied.” [My emphasis]
Sue Gardner, the former Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation (she left the position last month), has written several times on Wikipedia’s lack of gender diversity. In 2011, she noted that various studies and articles have found that registered women editors tend not to contribute much writing. Some of them say it’s due to Wiki’s interface, but overwhelmingly, it is due to Wikipedia’s sexist culture, specifically, feeling “intimidated by the tone of the discussions.” Women editors are put off by having to muster the energy to get “into fights with dudes.” Women don’t want to invest the little leisure time they have only to have their work undone by sexist men. One woman editor says:
“I used to contribute to Wikipedia, but finally quit because I grew tired of the “king of the mountain” attitude they have. You work your tail off on an entry for several YEARS only to have some pimply faced college kid knock it off by putting all manner of crazy stuff on there such as need for “reliable” sources when if they’d taken a moment to actually look at the reference they’d see they were perfectly reliable! I’m done with Wikipedia. It’s not only sexist but agist as well.”
Another woman reflects on her experience writing about gender violence:
“the Wikipedia entries on the Violence Against Women Movement and Act were very misleading, incorrect in some cases, and slightly sarcastic and minimizing to the work of women rights advocates. Every time an advocate would try to make corrections and update the entries, it would be removed and edited back to it’s original misleading version. I think many advocates felt like it was pointless to try and change it-or didn’t have the same kind of time and energy around it that these majority male editors have to maintain sexist and incorrect posts.”
Wikipedia sexism is also reflected in the lack of entries on women professionals and historical figures, including women scientists. STEM Women, which I am a part of, supported the Royal Society’s Wikipedia hack-a-thon. The annual event highlights the lack of Wikipedia articles about notable women scientists.
The issue is not just about editing – it is about the basic topics that women want to cover on Wikipedia which relate to women’s issues broadly defined: prominent women figures, women’s interests, and women’s knowledge. To be blunt, the gender inequality on Wikipedia is about a power struggle over gendered knowledge.
In sociology, we see that the acquisition, communication, reproduction and debates about information are influenced by socio-economics, including gender. On Wikipedia, the very act of writing about women or women-related themes is seen as political (“controversial”) and this automatically attracts hostility and excessive-editing. While men will argue with other men on Wikipedia pages, the pages written by women about women draw relentless negative attention.
As male views are dominant, they are not seen as gendered. Being male is the default. As it is seen as normal, and men’s presence is nothing out of the ordinary, male writing is perceived to be value-free. When a woman writes about women, it is contentious simply because her gender makes her knowledge and presence conspicuous. If a woman writes about women’s issues, she must automatically be biased – or so goes the sexist argument. When a man writes about other men, men’s issues, interests and topics, he is presumed to be objective by virtue of his gender.
Women’s knowledge on Wikipedia is Other; that is, it is different and therefore suspect and it invites furious edits and deletions simply because the average Wikipedian male sees that women don’t belong in their space. Women are threatening merely because they want their knowledge to be represented in a male field, Wikipedia, which is actually supposed to represent humanity. A loud and busy segment of Wikipedia men want women erased, silent and otherwise passive. They position women as merely observers of history, even when it involves them. This is how history has largely constructed women’s knowledge, as Other and subservient to men’s perspective, as Simone de Beauvoir famously argued in The Second Sex:
The issue with this latest edit frenzy on the #YesAllWomen Wiki page is further evidence of the misguided move to support so-called “reverse sexism,” a nonsensical term I wrote about recently in reference to the “not all man” defence” (see below). Women speaking out about sexism is not an act of sexism. Sexism describes institutional inequality that benefits some groups over Others. It requires social power, which men collectively hold, even if they don’t want to acknowledge these structural benefits.
#YesAllWomen is about creating safe spaces for women. Some men understand this; unfortunately many do not. Astronomer Phil Plait argues that this hashtag is an opportunity for men to reflect about the problems with masculinity, violence and entitlement. It symbolises the need for men to listen to women, not react defensively. He argues: “We men need to do better”:
Even though we may not be the direct problem, we still participate in the cultural problem. If we’re quiet, we’re part of the problem. If we don’t listen, if we don’t help, if we let things slide for whatever reason, then we’re part of the problem, too.
The Wikipedia page on the #YesAllWomen movement documents this global conversation about women’s experiences of masculine violence. Acts of gender violence reflect institutional problems with the way gender is constructed,enacted and socially enforced. Men who are editing this page say they want to use “more neutral” language. In actuality, they are simply defending their own social privilege on a platform that already favours men. In so doing, they contribute to more of the same gender violence that the #YesAllWomen dialogue was set up to explore and tear down.
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Image 2 text: What’s wrong with this picture? Professor Julia Slingo is Chief Scientist at the Met Office in Britain. Yet she merits only a few paragrpahs on Wikipedia. Support The Royal Society’s Wikipedia Edit-a-thon 4 March 14. Help spread Awareness of Women Scientists.
Image 3 text: [White male cartoon angry points to a blackboard with writing, saying, “OMG! This is totally unfair TO ME!” Text reads] “Times people cared about White men’s feelings [many] versus times people didn’t care about men’s feelings [once].”
Image 4 text: “Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being… She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.” Simone de Beauvoir.
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In social science, the concept of belief describes a statement that people think is either true or false. Beliefs are deep rooted because they evolve from early socialisation. They are maintained tacitly through everyday interactions with our primary social networks like family, religious communities, and through close friendships with people from the same socio-economic backgrounds. Beliefs are hard (though not impossible) to change because there is a strong motivation to protect what we believe. Beliefs are strongly tied to personal identities, culture and lifestyle. Beliefs are harder to change in a short frame time because they’re interconnected to structures of power and inequality. Chipping away at one belief means re-evaluating all beliefs we hold about what is “true,” “natural,” and “normal.”
Beliefs are hard to justify objectively because they represent the social scaffolding of all we take for granted.
In this meaning, beliefs represent the status quo of what we’re willing to accept. If we ask people: Why do you think your belief is correct? They’ll often answer on “gut instinct” or they’ll defer to common sense. This is true because everyone knows it! For many people, belief is either an act of faith that does not need scientific proof, or otherwise, people find evidence for their beliefs everywhere they look, even though this does not include looking to empirical data. In many cases, however, people will also refer to authoritative texts to back up their beliefs, like religious teachings or news reports.
The key to understanding why beliefs are hard to shift comes down to one question: Who benefits from this belief? For example, when we ask: Are men and women fundamentally different? Someone who benefits from patriarchy and doesn’t want to lose their gender privilege will say: “Of course, men and women are different, look around you! Women act this way and they’re from Venus; men act that way and they’re from Mars.” A social scientist will bring up examples from other cultures where gender is organised differently. Still, the other person will see these examples as exceptions to their rules about gender.
Gender differences are used to justify inequality: women are more caring, so they’re better at raising babies; men are more rational, so they make better leaders. To think otherwise means restructuring our labour arrangements at home and work; it means rethinking social policy about how we remunerate jobs; it means changing the balance of power in the law, in education, in the media and so on.
When people don’t believe scientists on climate change or genetically modified (GM) foods or vaccinations, it comes down to their assessment of: What does this mean for me? What life changes are required of me? How does this scientific knowledge undermine my place in the world? In other words: how does this science support or threaten my values?
Values are linked to one’s sense of morality. Where belief is something maintained at the individual level through agents of socialisation, values are more easily distinguished through their connection to broader social interests. Values relate to the standards of what individuals perceive to be “good” or “bad” in direct reaction to what our society deems to be “good” or “bad.” Values are shaped by cultural institutions like education and religion. Societies depend on shared values to maintain social order, which is why many societal values are often enshrined in law. Traditional societies appeal to values of authority like religion or authoritarian leadership. Christian capitalist societies appeal to values of individualism and economic rationalism. Social democratic societies are more secular and informed by humanist values. All of these underlying value systems impact on public values of science.
Still, values are contested, depending on whose social interest is being served.
Take for example GM foods. In Sweden, public consultation and scientific input is framed around best interests for public good. (Not without controversy.) Some Scandinavian laws will allow GM food to be grown in controlled areas because it benefits their national economy, but they won’t support imported GM foods. In countries like Peru, GM foods have been banned for 10 years because they mostly come from imported products. These products are deemed to be unsafe. At the same time, GM foods conflict with class struggles of the highly political Indigenous farming movement. Peru has a long history of mistreating Indigenous populations, but the national identity is firmly locked to agrarian innovation that stretches back to the Incan empire. Peru has also joined other Latin nations to wind down trade with the USA and increase trade with Asian nations. Resistance to GM foods serves a dual economic and political purpose of resisting cultural imperialism and supporting Indigenous farming movements. (Though Indigenous environmental protests are ignored in other areas, such mineral resources and specifically big oil.) The key here is the political economy of Peru (and Latin America more broadly) is informed by socialist values that resist capitalist interests. GM foods have publicly been positioned as part of this capitalist incursion.
In the USA the GMO public debate has been framed around commercial interests. This stems back to early industrial era and the plant patent act of 1930. The commercialisation of American agriculture goes back to the early 19th century, where many farming communities were self-sufficient. By the early 1920s differentiated crop varieties were already established. Trade associations arose as mass production started. With more money at stake, legislation steps in to formalise the production of seeds. Historical evidence shows that the law struggled to weigh up the commercial lobbying of large agricultural organisations (specifically the American Association of Nurserymen) versus the rights of small farmers. At this time, when economic rationalism was beginning to set precedents, commercial interests won out over collective interests. This isn’t simply a case of greed of corporations, this is about the political economy of early American society. American values were firmly tied to Protestant beliefs (sociologist Max Weber has detailed this thoroughly). In early American capitalism, it was God’s will that people should work hard and make as much money as possible, to ensure their place in heaven. The 1930 plant patent was fought heavily on moral and social grounds.
Today, these tensions around values and commercial interests often feature in GM food debates (see for example various highly emotive comments to our Science on Google+ Community). Invariably, people bring up Monsanto. I’m not a fan of Monsanto. In fact, I see them operating as a neo-colonialist corporate machine. Then again, I can accept that the practices of one entity do not nullify the potential benefits of GM foods altogether. I want to learn even more about the science and debate the findings robustly. Anti-science members of the public, however, cannot accept that scientific methodology of GM foods can be separated from commercial interests to help feed underprivileged people.
This is glaringly obvious when we have scientists discuss the not-for-profit scientific collective that have developed Golden Rice, a type of rice that is engineered to be rich in Vitamin A. In our Science community, we have people dismissing the potential benefits of Golden Rice, because they don’t believe that the science can remain commercially impartial. These people see only conspiracy and greed behind the motivations of scientists. Otherwise people argue that this technology is unsafe, though it’s been tested (though not without controversy over informed consent). People also get very angry that Golden Rice doesn’t address the social causes of poverty, such as corruption and social inequality. Golden Rice doesn’t claim to solve world poverty; it aims to address Vitamin A deficiency in developing regions.
People think that science should solve all the world’s problems, when in reality we tackle one aspect of one specific problem at a time.
Debates about GM foods are, in fact, a cultural battle over value systems. Are capitalist nations like America still deeply invested in individualistic values or can we move towards collective action? Scientists make the case that some GM food technologies represent a safe, relatively inexpensive way to address hunger. In order to accept this argument, the public needs to be able to trust that the science isn’t governed by commercial entities. How you see this depends on your values: are GM foods “good” or “bad”? A vocal section of the public is distrustful of science on GM foods. They think GM foods are bad. As I’ve shown this is both the outcome of history, culture and social changes. Different countries have different positions which influence whether people largely celebrate, decry or feel anxious about GM science.
In these cases, the science is used to draw very different conclusions. GMOs are either for or against the national interest. GMOs either support social change or they impede progress. Attitudes towards the science depends on the cultural and political interests of different social groups. What’s “good” or “bad” about GM foods depends on whose point of view best aligns with societal values.
Attitudes are relatively stable system of ideas that allow people to evaluate our experiences. This includes objects, situations, facts, social issues and other social processes. While attitudes are relatively stable, they are more superficial than beliefs and less normative than values. Attitudes can be changed more easily than beliefs. Sometimes people will say one thing, especially if it’s socially desirable to do so, but in private they may not adhere to that attitude. Someone can say they support equality but they may not practice it at home. Often times, however, people are not always aware that their attitudes are contradictory.
In contrast to values, which are culturally defined, attitudes are interpersonal. We are constantly interpreting other people in relation to the situation we find ourselves in. Language, motives, emotions and relationships can change attitudes over time. Social context also matters: cultural beliefs and values can influence whether or not attitudes change.
Attitudes about science are shaped by many societal processes, such as education, class, ethnicity and so on. Yet the social science literature has overwhelmingly shown that attitudes towards science are connected to:
Trust is a multi-dimensional concept; that is to say, it is made up of many different characteristics and these change with respect to a given social group in a particular time and place. Psychologist Roderick Kramer provides an extensive review of the empirical research on trust (he covers studies from the 1950s to 1999). At the interpersonal level, we develop trust in another person based on a belief that they have an interest to live up to our expectations. They care about us, they need us, they have a legal or moral obligation to help us. Among individuals, trust is about behaviour and reciprocity: I’ve proven you can trust me because I have not let you down and because we both understand that our trust goes both ways.
Some individuals can be generally considered to be “high trusters” and others “low trusters,” depending on their personal biographies; their experiences with institutions of authority; and other socio-cultural factors. People who are generally predisposed to the idea of trust are more likely to be open to collective social action. The reverse is true of people with low trust.
While Kramer doesn’t make this connection, low trust and commitment to social action impact on the public’s trust in science. If I hold a strong belief about the world and science contradicts my view, I will need a high degree of trust in order to be open to the information. If I take on board this scientific view, I will be forced to act on it. This means changing the social order that benefits me currently. That’s a big investment. If I have high trust in another oppositional social institution like religion or my community leader who is supporting my current belief system, why should I trust science?
At the societal level, trust doesn’t always work in relation to direct interpersonal engagement. Kramer shows how some people in certain circumstances will trust authority figures based on their history. That is: I trust this organisation because they have a strong reputation and other big players endorse them. Others will trust due to someone’s category of authority (science, politics), their role (medical practitioner, priest), or a “system of expertise” (bureaucratic management).
People who trust an authority figure or an organisation’s motives are more likely to accept outcomes, even if they are negative. Trust will matter more when people have a lot to lose, such as when an outcome is unfavourable. For example, when science will lead to social change or some new technological impact that I don’t want because it threatens my beliefs, livelihood, culture, identity or lifestyle – this requires high trust.
Research shows that public trust in social institutions has long been in decline. In America, civic trust was high just after WWII due to the nature of the war, its impact on the economy and other social changes. Public trust declined in the late-1960s due to the Vietnam war and other conservative economic and political changes. Public trust is generally at half the rate it was in the mid-1960s for federal government, universities, medial institutions and the media. Specific incidents become exemplars for more distrust, such as political scandals. Progress in technology is also related to higher distrust. People who live in relatively affluent, technologically advanced societies are more likely to distrust science. Up until the mid-1990s, the media was people’s main information source, but it was also the most distrusted social institution. The reverse was true of scientists: university researchers were trusted as experts, but people were less likely to be listening to them because they didn’t have much exposure to scientists.
In some cases, we might think that distrust in science is about lack of knowledge. Being familiar with a person or institution can help to engender trust, but not always. Again, it comes down to beliefs, values and attitudes.
People who are highly knowledgeable on a particular area such as politics are more likely to spend a lot of time taking in and responding to world views that contradict their own. These people have an information bias that they do not readily recognise. They will see themselves as rational and impartial. They see that they are sceptics ready to weigh up evidence as it comes to hand. In fact, they spend more emotional energy arguing against conflicting information because these clash with their personal world views. They argue passionately because their attitudes align with their beliefs and attitudes.
Conversely, people who know little about a topic are more likely to accept new information to be true or unbiased, but they show a weak commitment to defending this new information. Paradoxically, if people don’t feel personally invested on a social issue, they will not act. This suggests that more information or education on a topic alone is not enough to improve how the public engages in science or democratic processes.
Bluntly put, more public discussion on science alone is unlikely to convince people to productively engage in scientific discussions.
Even amongst scientists, trust in science and risk perception is affected by sociological processes. A 1999 study of the members from the British Toxicological Society finds that women were more likely to have higher risk perceptions for various social issues in comparison to men. This ranged from smoking, to car accidents, AIDS, and climate change. Looking deeper, it was a specific sub-set of White men who were more likely to perceive a low risk for these social issues; those with postgraduate qualifications who earned more than $50K a year and who were conservative in their politics. They were more likely to believe that future generations can take care of the risks from today’s technologies; they believed government and industry can be trusted to manage technological risks; they were less likely to support gender equality; and they were less likely to believe that climate change was human-made (bearing in mind climate change science has since developed further). These men had a higher trust in authority figures and they were less likely to support equality and social change. Why? Because being in a position of relative social power, they had the most to lose from social change on environmental, gender and political issues.
So if beliefs and values are so seemingly immutable, and attitudes mask underlying motives that people are unaware about, how do we increase trust in science to improve the tangible outcomes of public outreach?
Beliefs are tied to personal identities and social status. People defend beliefs on the grounds that what they believe is true, obvious or simply “a given fact” because they have been socialised to do so since birth. Beliefs are tied to social belonging and social benefits, so there’s a lot at stake in defending them. Beliefs about equality align with the environmentalist movement because addressing climate change requires full civic participation. The beliefs of environmentalists also overlap with feminists as both groups want to see change in the social order. Beliefs are shaped by social institutions, but they can also be restricted by material constraints.
Values are normative because they are linked to powerful social institutions. Some scientific innovations are perceived to be inherently “good” or “bad” depending on how vested social interests are understood. In some contexts, GMOs are seen as bad because people think scientists can’t be trusted to separate methods from commercial interests.
Attitudes are interpersonal. They depend upon social exchange with particular people, but attitudes also reflect hidden or contradictory ideas that people hold. Public trust in institutions has been eroded since the late 1960s in different ways in different societies. People don’t trust scientists because for much of our history, our knowledge has been kept within academia. Most of the time when science reached the public, it was been reported on by the media, which is itself a mistrusted, though widely consumed, source of information.
Changing attitudes on “hot button” scientific issues is hard because people who seek out these debates already have pre-existing beliefs. Sometimes people think they’re being sceptical of a corrupt or unjust system when they take an anti-science perspective, as with the case of GM foods.
Most people view themselves favourably when it comes to social, economic, political and scientific issues. They think they’re impartial and rational, when really they’re just defending their place in the world.
Sometimes people already have a high distrust of institutions like medicine and science because they’ve been marginalised or abused by systems of power. The history of medicine has many horror stories, especially in connection to unethical treatment of Indigenous groups, minorities, women and the mentally ill. Unfortunately, science cannot simply hatch these up to isolated incidents of yore, as these cases directly impact on present-day public mistrust of scientists.
Rather than dismissing the past, it is more useful for scientists to understand how historical and cultural relations affect how people perceive the scientific community.
Better public education on science is only part of the answer. As we see, even amongst highly educated scientists, those with greater social power will happily acquiesce to higher authority. They are willing to take more risks with science and technology, but they are less supportive of equality and progressive social change where this threatens their beliefs and social position.
Supporting the public’s reflexive critical thinking is more important than simply pumping out science information.
Sociologist Ulrich Beck argues that a general state of reflexivity might be part of the reason why people are so worried about technological and social risks in ways that are not especially productive.
Reflexive critical thinking is a methodology for knowing how to question information, as well as identifying and controlling for our personal biases.
As Susanne Bleiberg Seperson and others have argued, sociology has a public image problem. The public doesn’t know what we do, let alone how we do it. We write in jargon. We are seen as too theoretical and not very practical.
The social sciences are well-poised to improve the public’s trust in science because our work is focused on the influence of social institutions on behaviour. We are not above critique on these grounds. My blog has regularly shown how even as we expand social knowledge of culture and inequality, Western social sciences can misappropriate minority cultures or exclude Indigenous voices.
Many of the anti-science critics are espousing cultural arguments without knowing it. This is where public sociology can really shine, by showing how inequality, social values and power affect how people engage with science.
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]]>By Zuleyka Zevallos, PhD
WARNING: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that the content on this page may contain images and references to deceased persons. (Why this warning?)
The Council of Australian Governments has conducted a national review of Indigenous socio-economic outcomes. Its recent report finds that while some measures are improving, there is still a large gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. This post provides a snapshot of the findings with a focus on education and responses by the state. One of the solutions being offered to improve educational outcomes amongst Indigenous youth is to send them to boarding schools. I discuss this in relation to Australia’s colonial history and the Government’s paternalistic views on Indigenous welfare.
I review other approaches to Indigenous education, which focus on working to students’ strengths in order to improve outcomes. This means making curriculum more focused on applied skills, vocational training within remote communities, and ensuring knowledge is culturally relevant. At the same time, educational efforts must avoid “pigeon holing” Indigenous students and teachers. Instead, education needs to make leadership and career pathways more accessible, and ensure that Indigenous insights are being fed back into the education system.
Finally, my post explores how sociological teaching and activism needs to change in reflection of the history of Indigenous educational practices.
Indigenous people make up over 2 percent of Australia’s national population. The majority of Indigenous Australians claim an Aboriginal ancestry (90%), 6 percent are from Torres Strait Islander ancestry and the rest are a mix of both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage.
Around a third of Indigenous people live in major cities (32%), an even number live in inner and outer regional localities (21% and 22% respectively), 15 percent live in very remote areas and the rest live in remote areas (9%). The distinctions between remote and very remote regions refers to the road distance to social and health services. The map to the right shows Australia’s regions mapped against this remoteness criteria. The dark blue represents the very remote areas and the light blue are remote, while the small patches of red represent the cities where most Australians live. The geographic remoteness typifying where two-thirds of Indigenous Australians live is significant given that Australia is “one of the most urbanised countries in the world,” and 69% of our national population lives in major cities.
Professor Pat Dudgeon is a psychologist who has studied the history, education and health outcomes of Indigenous people. She is part of the National Health Commission and a member of the Bardi people of the Kimberley in Western Australia. In a review of the socio-cultural and historical context of Indigenous Australians, Dudgeon and colleagues estimate that Indigenous history in Australia can be traced back to 50,000 to 120,000 years.
At the time of European arrival in 1788, there were an estimated 300,000 Indigenous Australians living in Australia who spoke 260 distinct languages and 500 dialects. Dudgeon and colleagues note that affinity to the land and a strong and complex kinship system binds all people together and reinforces their spiritual bonds to nature. The colonialists, however, did not recognise the Indigenous custodianship of the land, declaring Australia an uninhabited land (terra nullius) and launched a violent campaign that decimated the Indigenous population and imposed a campaign of cultural genocide.
Dudgeon and colleagues chronicle that in 1883, New South Wales established the Aboriginal Protection Board. The Board later enacted the Aborigines Protection Act in 1909 which granted the state the power to confine Indigenous people in missions and reserves. Other states followed with similar Boards and legislation that imposed British culture and Christianity, stripping children of access to their land, culture and Indigenous languages. Indigenous people began to be classified under a legally imposed racial system. Using social Darwinism, the state ranked children according to whether they were “full blood,” “half-caste” and so on, using this system to remove children from their families. At its heart, this legal caste system reflected the social and scientific view that Indigenous Australians were somehow lesser in their humanity than the European invaders.
Indigenous resistance movements fought against colonialism throughout this period. Dudgeon and colleagues note several significant incidents of frontier warfare; the activism of William Cooper and the Australian Aborigines League and William Ferguson’s leadership of the Aborigines Progressive Association both in the 1920s; and a maritime strike in 1936. The latter lead to the rise of the Island Councillors meeting and the revised Aboriginal Protection Act of 1939 which provided Islanders greater authority.
While other Australians had the right to vote in 1902, Indigenous women did not get the right to vote until 1962, except enrolling to vote was still optional despite it being compulsory for other Australians. (Though some individual Indigenous people lobbied and voted in protest as far back as the 1890s.) The 1967 Commonwealth Referendum finally granted Indigenous Australians full citizenship. The landmark native title case in 1992 led by Eddie Mabo affirmed the Meriam people ownership of their land. Despite these advances, the legal, cultural, social, psychological, and health damage suffered under colonialism continues to the present day.
The forced removal of Indigenous children meant that families were not only separated, but children were put into institutions that had sub-standard health and educational access. This history explains the connection between socio-economics, health and institutional racism. That is, discrimination through official social policy and the practices of other social organisations.
Citing various national indicators reports from the late 2000s, Dudgeon and colleagues note that Indigenous people are “the most disadvantaged group in Australia” along every major socio-economic measure. Indigenous people have a significantly lower household income relative to non-Indigenous Australians, they are less likely to own their homes, they have a high suicide rate, and they have higher child protection notices. Some of the statistics that are of most relevance to educational outcomes include these facts:
Moreover, in 2012, Indigenous men were over 17 times more likely to be incarcerated relative to other Australian men (4,093 per 100,000 population versus 234 per 100,000). Indigenous women have 24 times the rate of incarceration relative to non-Indigenous women, though in smaller numbers (405 per 100,000 versus 17 per 100,000 ).
While Indigenous social welfare workers and activists have sought to address these issues in culturally relevant ways, institutional racism is both socially pervasive and impeding of progress.
A nationally representative survey by geography Professor Kevin Dunn identifies that a high proportion of Australians still see Indigenous Australians as an “out-group.” Specifically, 58 percent of respondents said that “Indigenous Australians did not fit into Australian society.” Dunn notes that various opinion polls find that many Australians hold stereotypes of Indigenous Australians as supposed welfare dependent alcoholics who have failed to “assimilate.” This stereotype fails to recognise that the historical practices that tore families and communities apart continue to impact on the poor health and socio-economic opportunities of Indigenous Australians. Stereotypes also help fuel and legitimise racist discriminations of Indigenous Australians at school, work and in public life in general.
The majority of Indigenous people that Dunn surveyed say that racism is a problem in Australia (95%) and two-thirds also noted that White people hold social privilege due to their race. The level and types of racism experienced by Indigenous people was higher than for other groups, with a third experiencing racism at work (29%) and in education (36%) and up to a quarter in housing (21%) and policing (23%). While non-English people experienced higher rates of workplace racism (36%), they reported lower incidents along the other measures, notably in education (30%).
The Council of Australian Governments (CoAG) released a report in June which finds a set of mixed health and socio-economic outcomes amongst Indigenous Australians. Death amongst Indigenous children has been decreasing (to 5.7 deaths per 100 000 annually), but Indigenous adults still die at twice the rate of other Australians.
Indigenous completion rates of high school (to Year 12 or equivalent) has risen from 47% in 2006 to 54% in 2011, however in the Northern Territory high school completion is lower by almost 7 percentage points. Most of the Territory is categorised as a very remote region. There are also mixed results for literacy. Reading levels have improved amongst Indigenous children in Years 3 to 7, but numeracy has decreased since 2008. The opposite trend is found amongst older Indigenous students in Year 9. While post-school qualifications have been improving for the rest of Australia, amongst Indigenous people, there has been little improvement.
Only 55 percent of Indigenous children in the Northern Territory are still in school by Year 10. This is the lowest rate of educational retention in Australia in the one area that has the highest proportion of Indigenous people (30% of the local population).
One of the Government proposals to improve literacy and school retention is sending Indigenous children to boarding schools. If this is a local facility that does not take children too far from their local communities, this may be workable, however, at its heart, this idea of removal of children has troubling undertones mired by Australia’s colonial history.
Bruce Wilson, chair of review into Indigenous education system for the Northern Territory Government, says that educational facilities and administration of the curriculum is substandard in the Territory. Teachers are not adequately trained and children are not motivated to stay at school. The solution, to send children away to boarding schools, is seen as a means to improve student attrition. The premise, however, gives up on improving teacher training and infrastructure. Wilson says that the goal is to entice children to remain at school and to stay connected to their communities:
Young people need continuing contact with their culture, with their language, with their families and communities.
The boarding school proposal is controversial as it would take children away from their families. Australia’s colonial history makes this a problematic course of action.
In the early stages of European settlement, in 1911, the Government set up a Chief Protector who become the “legal guardian of every Aboriginal and every half-caste child up to the age of 18 years.” Seven years later, the Protector was also the legal guardian of all Indigenous women unless they were married to a white English-speaking man. In the mid-1950s, children were forcibly removed from their families and sent to live with White missionaries. They grew up dislocated from their culture and languages, and are therefore dubbed The Stolen Generation.
More recently in 2007, the so-called Northern Territory Intervention was enacted under a modified colonialist mindset – one still operating through paternalistic views about Indigenous welfare. The Government sent the military and police to ban alcohol and restrict Indigenous access to welfare. The improvement on social life has been negligible, despite the fact that Indigenous human rights were sacrificed under the guise of protection for women and children.
The educational outcomes of Indigenous youth in the Northern Territory are connected to broader systemic racism. Indigenous unemployment is high in the Territory. As Wilson argues:
It is very hard to encourage young people who live in communities with very limited job opportunities to keep coming to school to do an education that they know will not get them a job in the community.
Educators in the Northern Territory have long argued that Indigenous outcomes in education and work would be greatly improved with better support for teachers and students, using a non-Western framework of learning. In 2011, senior educator Chris Garner (Scottish-Australian who grew up in South Africa) gave a talk at TEDx Darwin where he outlined the success of a program that drew on Indigenous perspectives. Garner points out that the sparsely populated Northern Territory is the size of the UK. Its remoteness is a challenge and part of the disincentive to continue with school through to graduation.
Rather than starting from a Western idea of what students need, Garner’s program focuses on culturally relevant learning practices. This includes a mix of traditional activities such as basket weaving, as well as the regular curriculum. Maths and literacy have an applied focus, with lessons based on job case studies that the students are interested in, from social work, to plumbing to construction and so on. Students also do work placements in their local communities so that they get an opportunity to build up work experience, and they are also able to join a workplace that speaks their Indigenous language.
Garner finds that the students’ confidence increases when they are judged against non-Western criteria, and more specifically, when they are graded against their local Indigenous cultures. He gives the example of students who are reticent to write because they’re afraid of being ridiculed for making mistakes. Garner encourages them to write and suspends grading their spelling at first, focusing instead on their ideas. Later, as their confidence grows, he takes the time to demonstrate why spelling is important in particular jobs.
Under this program, 96% of those learning a culturally relevant program are graduating versus only one third of other Indigenous students in other parts of Australia. Rather than being teacher-led, the last two years of school are structured around the individual needs and cultural expectations of students. Garner says this individualised approach does not need to be viewed with apprehension by mainstream education. He says:
It’s an evolution of the teacher, not a revolution of the system.
In July 2012, principal Judith Ketchell told SBS News (below) that there are around 180 teachers in the Northern Territory, of whom around half are Indigenous. She says that the problems these teachers face are part of the broader educational issues facing all Indigenous Australians. This includes getting stronger support so that they aren’t “pigeon holed” into teaching certain types of subjects, that they see clear career pathways, and that they have the potential to develop and enact their leadership. She says in the video below:
We need more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers in Australian classrooms. Not only to close the gap for our literacy and numeracy, but to help our non-Indigenous colleagues develop more understanding about Aboriginal and Islander history and culture in schools.
Much like the challenges facing Indigenous educators, Australian sociology has many issues to address. Indigenous sociologist Kathleen Butler-McIlwraith finds that our discipline presents several problems in the way we teach, research and discuss Indigenous experiences. First, many of our key texts are written from a particular White Western perspective. For example, we continue to teach Durkheim who used Indigenous Australians as a case study of a “primitive” culture. Even when using the work of Marx and Foucault, Butler-McIlwraith must “critically” and “cautiously” approach their work as an Indigenous woman. Second, most Australian sociology deals with Indigenous issues deals via written texts that speak on behalf of Indigenous people, rather drawing on face-to-face ethnographic dialogue.
Butler-McIlwraith is acutely aware of her Otherness both in her approach to teaching and in the way in which her teaching is positioned within academia. She was reticent to introduce her own personal experience into the classroom because much of sociology focuses on the written texts of major White male figures (for further discussion, see Butler-McIlwraith’s PhD thesis). Much of Indigenous scholarship constructs Indigenous people as Other, focusing on problems, especially on rural and remote Indigenous problems. Butler-McIlwraith grew up in urban New South Wales, and so these rural experiences are as foreign to her as they are to her predominantly White students. Furthermore, Butler-McIlwraith notes that she and her Indigenous academic colleagues are mostly teaching Indigenous subjects, which reinforces that academia primarily defines and values their knowledge and scholarship in a narrow way. She writes:
Many Indigenous academics remain peripheral to the academy, other than in the position of the ubiquitous guest lecturer – the reserve army of labour for White academics to selectively include in order to handle the contentious obligatory Indigenous inclusion.
This post has been concerned with the very issues Butler-McIlwraith identifies. First, while I identify as a woman of colour I am not an Indigenous Australian, nor have I conducted ethnographic research on Indigenous education. I have plans to produce other collaborative works (watch this space!) but my interest in Indigenous education is informed by my interest in breaking down Otherness and issues of social justice more broadly.
Second, I have focused on remote Indigenous communities, which in many ways speaks to the primary image that many Australians have of Indigenous Australians. Australian sociologists have a profound respect of Indigenous cultures, but what does this mean and how do we make a real difference?
Every sociological event I’ve ever attended, such as a conference or public lecture, includes a Welcome to Country. This involves a formal acknowledgement of the traditional landowners of the place where we are, and a brief speech by a local Indigenous elder. Indigenous issues usually feature in Australian sociology textbooks, but Indigenous knowledge remains distinct. Australian sociology still relies heavily on European theorists and White Australian scholarship. In short, Indigenous knowledge is not central to the way in which we teach sociology.
This is where Australian history, academic practice and socio-economic dynamics need to change. Sociologists are acutely aware of power and discourse, and yet Indigenous colleagues are not only a minority, but a specialised labour force. Indigenous perspectives are reserved for discussions on Indigenous problems (reproducing Indigenous Australians as “Other”), but Indigenous perspectives are not integrated into the way in which we teach sociology. Butler-McIlwraith writes:
I would suggest that those currently enfranchised in the discipline should give some consideration to what a dialogue between the centre and periphery will entail. Is the centre willing to become more inclusive, or are Indigenous knowledges to remain the appendices to White thought?
My post has shown how historical policies continue to affect institutional racism and negatively affect the outcomes of Indigenous students. The lesson from the material I present here is not simply that Indigenous education is a societal problem that requires novel, non-Western solutions that are inclusive of Indigenous ways of learning. Without doubt, this is an issue affecting not just Indigenous communities, but it undermines Australian society more generally. A significant group within our nation is dramatically disadvantaged by our educational system; this requires collective action.
Beyond this central point, the problems facing Indigenous education are partly reflected in our own unexamined sociological practices. A uniquely Australian sociology should be at the centre of educational transformation, by critically addressing our engagement with the texts we use and produce, and by making Indigenous perspectives an ongoing feature of our teaching and critical thinking. While we continue to draw on the voices of European and White theorists (mostly men as I’ll show in a later post), we silence the contribution of Indigenous perspectives. To paraphrase Garner: it’s time for evolution of the sociological teacher/ activist, and a revolution of the Australian sociological system.
Learn more about key figures who fought for social, educational and legal rights of Indigenous Australians:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcslF8yQ1Tg&feature=share&list=PLE7093A31AA1EE3FD
Indigenous cultural traditions impose different rules about how Indigenous people may be represented in public after death. This can include not using their first name, and not viewing images of the deceased. Not all Indigenous people follow the same norms, but the media have been called to observe this warning. In some cases, after the passage of time Indigenous people may be spoken about publicly, or they will be given a new name. This belief has been misrepresented in popular culture as a superstition about the soul being captured on film. This is not about superstition; it is about a communal process of honouring the dead. Read more on Creative Spirits, who quote Margaret Parker from the Punjima people in north-west Western Australia:
A cultural practice of our people of great importance relates to our attitude to death in our families. Like when we have someone passed away in our families and not even our own close families, the family belongs to us all, you know. The whole community gets together and shares that sorrow within the whole community.
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The findings: Dissatisfaction amongst online students
Bergstrand and Savage studied 118 sociology courses, including data drawn from 400 student evaluations. Other studies cited in this research have found that students who perceive a course to be either too difficult or too easy will tend to rate a course negatively. Similarly, the personality and “likeability” of teachers can also influence student evaluations. This suggests that students may be rating individual qualities rather than the course materials and information per se. The researchers controlled for both by comparing evaluations of the same instructors across online and face to face courses.
Bergstrand and Savage note that both face to face and online courses may present different opportunities for lecturers to excel depending on their class delivery method. It is feasible to presume that teachers who may not be as entertaining face to face may do better teaching online if they have strong writing skills; and vice versa for gregarious instructors whose mannerisms work a treat face to face but may not translate well into a virtual environment. Their findings generated some support but with little insight about why this might be the case. There was evidence that teachers who were rated poorly by students face to face had better results when they taught online; however, all online courses had poor ratings.
Online courses and the exploitation of graduate student teachers
Bergstrand and Savage note that their sample only included graduate student instructors; that is, the lecturers were postgraduate students who were also completing their Masters or PhDs. This may mean that these teachers are less experienced and might not have developed the reflexivity required to adapt their face to face methods to an online forum. The researchers note, however, that other studies find that teaching evaluations for teachers do not change much over time.
The greatest limitation of this study is one that the researchers signal early on: they do not have data comparing learning outcomes of students to their evaluations. Speaking from my experience teaching at two Australian universities, student evaluations are generally undertaken in the final week of the course, after the students have handed in their final assignments but not necessarily before they have received their final mark for that last piece of work, and generally not before their final exams and overall course grade. Students who feel they have not learned anything may (or may not) be expressing frustration that they have not received enough feedback to gauge their progress at other points in the semester. Or perhaps they are disheartened by the level of work leading up to the final essays, assignments and exams.
Nevertheless, subjective perception of course satisfaction has real world outcomes. As the researchers note, these evaluations directly impact on whether or not instructors are promoted or if they are given the opportunity obtain a tenure position. The authors caution that students may not be getting the same quality teaching in online courses, so they argue that the higher education sector needs to examine this critically.
Students who leave a course dissatisfied should be heard and universities should respond. The question is: how? With the higher education sector under pressure in many nations around the world, Australia included, universities are moving increasingly towards online delivery. The majority of undergraduate classes are taught by graduate students. More experienced academics are able to buy out their teaching, or they are concentrated in postgraduate or specialist courses. This means that it is early career researchers who are suffering most from the demands of online teaching.
In comparison to senior lecturers, graduate teachers represent a source of cheap labour. The exploitation of younger academics has been a point of contention for some time, demonstrated most loudly in the University of Sydney’s long-standing industrial dispute. (You can read Raewyn Connell’s erudite summary of the issues in her public lecture. The precarious working conditions faced by early career teachers is a central feature.)
Under the current system, the training, resources and skills available to early career academics may well be inadequate. Bergstrand and Savage argue that even when graduate teaching instructors receive some formal teaching training, this is not specifically tailored to online environments.
MOOCs
Interestingly, two high profile Australian academics have recently come out to critique Massive Open Online Courses or “MOOCs.” Sandra Peter, lecturer at the University of Sydney Business School, was a bit more neutral, arguing that large, free online courses are redefining the meaning of what constitutes a “good” education. Peter sees that MOOCs potentially challenge what we mean by “learning.” This is partly because MOOCs are not always accredited (though some big universities and corporations are involved). More problematic is the fact that most MOOCs do not demand very much from students to demonstrate their new-found knowledge or skills.
Professor Gilly Salmon, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Learning Transformations) at Swinburne University (my alma mater) likens MOOCs to vending machines. Salmon argues MOOCs treat students like consumers and that they are unconcerned with the quality of education and learning.
Some of the traditional universities are adapting to MOOCs; others may be overly critical because they see MOOcs threaten the higher education system (though Salmon says they are not real competition for universities). Yet more universities have readily adopted online courses. Both Sydney University and Swinburne and most other Australian universities I can think of have either created new online courses or transitioned old courses into an online environment. Not coincidentally, other face to face courses are being cut. Swinburne shut down an entire campus just this year, with a second campus scheduled for closure next year.
With the threat of MOOCs, and with ever-looming funding cuts, online courses seem a cheaper alternative to face to face courses. Universities can enrol more students without the barrier of distance and perhaps, it seems, with less accountability for student satisfaction and learning.
What’s the problem with sociology and online learning?
How might the findings differ in other disciplines? Could there be something unique about sociology that is better suited to face to face learning? After all, it is a discipline centrally concerned with social interaction, culture and dialogue. Sociology is probably not alone in the issues arising in online classrooms, but we need empirical data to test the differences.
While online environments require different modes of communication, it is still a sophisticated social environment. At the same time, the way in which sociology is currently taught may not be suited to online environments as they currently stand – under resourced and with learning outcomes poorly understood. Sociology requires a high degree of reading, writing but also critical debate. Sociology tutorials are typically structured around group work and oral debates. Again, these teaching methods are not unique to sociology nor the social sciences. So is the problem a poor fit between sociology and online learning; poor training on offer to educators; or is the issue online delivery in general?
While there is diversity in the content and course structure of face to face sociology courses, the delivery and broad teaching aims are more or less similar. Sociology teaches students to participate in informed debate about societies. It demands strong oral and written communication skills as well as demonstration of critical thinking. These skills are in high demands in many industries. As technologies change, these skills will have to keep adapting. The issue is that there seems to be a disconnect between sociology, online learning and student satisfaction. This puts sociology students at a double disadvantage. First, they leave university feeling like they received a poor education. Second, they did not receive adequate support to help them learn and apply sociological thinking through technology.
Moving forward
Online courses are a new and developing phenomena, but the methods seem to adhere more to asynchronous communication of the early Internet years. This may include handing out large volumes of course materials, pre-recording lectures and maybe hosting Q&A over email forums. These methods offer limited social engagement.
Traditional universities prefer to set up their own online learning systems. Perhaps this technology is also impeding student learning and satisfaction. Innovative teachers may use social media to manage student interaction, but this does not seem to be a standardised process. I see benefits of using Google Hangouts to improve online learning, but time will tell whether this technology and others like it will be integrated into online learning. Meanwhile, the methods for online teaching are having real-time impact on student learning – and judging by this study’s negative evaluations, this is not good.
There are major problems with online education, but there is room for improvement. What are your thoughts on Bergstrand and Savage’s findings? What are your observations of online learning versus face to face classes? Are there other factors at play which may influence online learning satisfaction? How might applied sociology improve online learning to better support the education and work outcomes of students?
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]]>By Zuleyka Zevallos
The discipline of sociology has grappled with several overlapping issues regarding the purpose and utility of our profession beyond its intellectual pursuit. Debates about the social impact of sociology have been historically centred on three questions relevant to applied sociology – which I define here as sociology conducted outside universities for particular clients. These questions are: sociology for what?; sociology for whom?; and sociology for where? In today’s post, I will discuss the who, what and where of sociology, before introducing a fourth question that is so taken-for-granted we don’t spend much time talking about it in any concrete way. That is: how do we actually do sociology outside traditional academic research? We assume sociologists can go out into the world and apply their training to different problems. But what kind of problems do we work on and how do we actually carry out the work in different places? I argue that applied sociology is set up as the “other” of academic sociology because of the context in which we practice our craft. This stops sociologists from engaging with one another effectively, and hinders the transformational work we do separately with our respective audiences.
I seek to build upon the framework discussed in this post for a series exploring the practicalities of doing sociology outside academia. I hope that the ideas explored here and in future posts can open up dialogue about how to better address collaboration between academic and applied sociologists.
Robert Lynd posed the question “knowledge for what?” in 1939, teasing out the tensions about carrying out research that might be reappropriated by funding bodies to suit their vested interests. Sociologists study culture – but they are also the outcome of culture, as well as contributors to it. They are also constrained by the culture of the groups who fund their research. Lynd focused on American culture at a time where he felt that social scientists had to take a stand against particular institutions. Lynd argued we should only carry out research about topics that matched social science values.
Sociology has evolved from this idealist position, although sociological principles still steer researchers towards some topics and institutional causes over others. This question remains relevant to applied sociologists, as it demands that we ask: who benefits from sociological practice and how will our knowledge be used in “the real world”?
Alfred McClung Lee posed the question “sociology for whom?” in his 1976 Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association. This question has plagued sociology since its inception: why do we do sociology? Do we do it for other sociologists? If so, research and academic publishing are the main outcomes of our discipline. Do we do it for a broader public? If so, then how do we support the activities of sociologists who practice outside universities?
In the late 1990s, Anne Mensy argued that sociologists don’t see policy-makers as the primary consumers of sociological knowledge. This hampers the ability for sociologists to take control of how a “sociological consciousness” might be diffused to the broader public. Mensy sees that sociology is for everybody; it is not simply an academic art. It should shape what currently passes for “common sense,” ultimately replacing it with a reflexive approach to how individuals understand their responsibility to other people.
In 2004, Michael Burawoy addressed the same question by talking about the four audiences that sociology addresses. Two of these are academic audiences. Professional sociology is concerned about theory and empiricism. Critical sociology addresses our discipline’s ideals, morality and our internal debates. The other two audiences are non-academic. Policy sociology addresses clients and policy intervention. Public sociology speaks to broader society at the grassroots level as well as through public intellectualism. This includes widely-distributed books and mass media.
Ulrich Beck takes up Burawoy’s ideas and argues that sociology has already permeated other applied fields. He finds sociological concepts and methods are being used in government, journalism, social policy and law enforcement, but they’ve been transformed so they aren’t recognisable as sociology. Beck argues that our discipline has failed to take control of this knowledge diffusion. Beck muses that in some ways, this makes sociology “provocative” and exciting, because it is able to take life in new forms. In other ways, it suggests that sociology requires re-invention if it is to take charge of how sociology gets applied in non-academic contexts. Beck argues that the best way to do this is by addressing inequalities in different national contexts in novel ways. He also argues sociology needs to find new approaches if it is to actively shape social progress at the transnational level. Otherwise, he warns, sociology is at risk of becoming a “museum piece.” Beck writes:
a re-vitalised sociological imagination can and does have all kinds of impacts – it can be neglected, misunderstood and redefined for all kinds of interests. When public or other kinds of sociology become an integral part of practical and political discourses, they are effectively being ‘transformed’, that is, divested of their sociological identity, and constructed ‘anew’ in the interests and for the purposes of practical argumentation and acting.
Applied sociologists take charge of translating sociology into new contexts by virtue of the fact that they work in non-academic contexts. So where and how do we meet up with our academic colleagues in order to take up the challenge of transforming sociology in a more cohesive and mutually supportive manner?
Thinking about how place influences sociological analysis is central to the work of applied sociologists. Place can mean geography – where the research is being conducted. It can also speak to the social location (or status) of the researcher and their participants or clients in relation to the place where a project is undertaken.
Australian sociologist Barbara Pini illuminates the “sociology of where?”question beautifully by reflecting on her position as a young female PhD student interviewing male leaders of a rural Queensland agricultural organisation. Her participants were keen to emphasise their masculinity and heterosexuality as a point of superiority. Their discussion was focused on themselves as powerful, busy experts. Their language and tone was used to repeatedly undermine Pini’s scientific authority and her ability to represent their experiences given her status as a woman. Pini’s male supervisor attended some meetings with these agricultural leaders and he was not subjected to the same disrespect. Pini notes that her sociological training had not really prepared her to manage such experiences.
Feminism has made power relationships in research more visible. Feminists politicise the notion that the bodies of researchers and their participants communicate knowledge and power relations. Related issues are discussed through the concepts of the “embodied knower” and “situated knowledge.” Pini is now a fully-fledged academic (well and truly, she’s a Professor of sociology). This means her research does not meet my working definition of applied sociology. Nevertheless, her research brings focus on the personal costs of doing sociology in places where the embodied knowledge of sociologists is met with open hostility and aggression. Pini argues that sociology should be concerned with addressing sociological questions from several perspectives: “Who is asking whom about what and where?” So – how do we address these questions in a non-academic context?
Applied sociologists do not always engage in research as a primary activity. They manage case work; they are involved in mediation; they work for unions; they manage local community projects; they work with not-for-profit groups; they are involved in policy and decision-making – amongst other things. Applied sociologists collaborate with activists and practitioners from other disciplines, and they work collaboratively with communities. The work we do does not always resemble the type of sociology privileged by the academy. Applied sociologists are often constrained in their ability to attend conferences and publish in academic journals. This means our work is less notable to our academic colleagues.
How we do sociology is just as important as knowing what, who and where we practice. We don’t see it important to ask “sociology for how?,” primarily because it’s poor grammar and moreover, it’s assumed that applying theories, concepts and methods is straightforward. It isn’t. Sociological tools need to translated, re-interpreted, negotiated and modified to suit different working contexts. Reflecting on applied sociological work, we should be asking:
Who is doing sociology with whom? About what? How and where?
Let’s think a little more about these questions using some examples:
There seems to be less of a focus on the temporal dimension of sociological practice. We don’t explicitly ask “sociology for when?”, although I’ve previously discussed that the sociology of time is a useful way to think about culture. Different groups have different understandings of time, and these ideas of time have given rise to different social relations. For now, it’s sufficed to say that social definitions of time in different parts of the world have an effect on the ways that applied sociologists work. I will take up this point much later in this blog series.
Another issue related to “how” and “where” of applied sociology relates to what happens in our absence in the industries and places that our discipline considers unsavoury, unworthy of our sociological attention, or otherwise problematic. Those of us who go to work outside universities are met with a great deal of criticism from our colleagues. The differences between academic and applied work contexts are very real, however, the ideological divisions between different sociological practices are artificial, unnecessary and fundamentally doing our discipline a disservice.
I’ve previously noted that the lines between applied and academic practices are sometimes blurred as many academics will work in policy areas or undertake contract work for clients. Researchers might start off working in universities, then work as consultants for a time, and then return to academia. Nevertheless, the what/whom/where/how questions facing academics who do research on applied topics have different connotations than the questions and issues facing sociologists who work in non-academic organisations. Notably, the collision between the “where” and “how” questions means that expertise of applied sociologists are not conferred the same institutional authority as universities do for academic sociologists.
In 2007, I founded the Applied Sociology Group within The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) to address the professional issues and concerns of non-academic sociologists. In 2009, a small group of colleagues and I set up Sociology at Work (S@W) to extend this network internationally. (We did so with the financial support of TASA.) S@W aims to support the career planning of sociology graduates and to promote the research and activities of applied sociologists. Through these groups, I have found that many applied sociologists will privately talk with one another about the confusion, derision and criticism we encounter from former academic colleagues about the work we do. Sometimes applied sociologists feel frustrated by our discipline’s focus on being “too academic” (defined as being overly focused on jargon and abstract ideas). Then again some applied researchers find ways to accommodate academic practices in their daily work. Nevertheless, more often than not, applied sociologists are looked down upon by their former academic colleagues for doing work that is judged to be inferior.
By leaving the academy, we may enter organisations that make many academic sociologists uncomfortable either because of a moral objection to particular institutions or because the work seems to dilute sociological principles. This might relate to certain areas of government (“sociology for what?”), law enforcement (“sociology for whom?”), and commercial market research (“sociology for where?”).
For a long while, I have been arguing that applied sociology is set up as the “other” of academic work. When I left academia as an early career researcher, I specialised in ethnicity and migrant issues. After struggling to find stable, long-term work in academia, I went to work in government conducting analysis on counter-terrorism issues, national security and social cohesion. In doing so, I was met with a range of emotional responses by my academic colleagues and mentors related to the “sociology for what?” Some people were bemused and curious, but most were highly sceptical of what the motives could be for hiring a sociologist in the defence and national security space. Other sociologists were incredulous that I could maintain my ethical compass amidst the moral decay that they see as the undercurrent of all government work.
In 2007, I noted that Peter Berger once drew a comparison between sociologists who work for governments and ‘An alchemist locked up by a predatory prince who needs gold and needs it quickly…’ In the same article, I argued that this portrait of government work as nefarious explains the general reticence that sociologists have about national security research. I noted then that only a few Australian academics had publicly supported applied sociological work in this space. Little has changed since.
In 2010, I reflected about my adventures outside academia, focusing on the fact that my sociological training did not prepare me for how to manage my career beyond university walls. After five years, I left my job with the Australian Public Service. I would later go on to work on a large-scale investigation. We analysed how chemicals and practices used during training exercises may have led to adverse health and environmental outcomes amongst emergency service volunteers in rural Victoria in Australia. I will reflect further on my professional lessons in the near future. Today I want to draw a connection between the “otherness” of applied sociology and how it fits in with the broader questions of what, who, where and how of sociological practice.
My former Sociology at Work colleague, Anthony Hogan, has worked “at the coal face” of social policy. He argues that his academic colleagues are not willing or able to work on the “grimy” negotiations that are necessary to generate policy within government. Hogan argues that academics focus on “merciless critique” of social problems, but they are not willing to engage in the reality of doing policy work. This work involves compromises and fiscal concerns:
The art that I find so beguiling – developing policy iteratively, moulded by an environment of political contest and organisational advocacy, responsive to unexpected opportunity, stymied by unforeseen barriers and shaped by financial exigency – is an uncomfortable discipline for the purist. In the context of the insights that Bourdieu (1998; 2003), Shergold (2005), Saunders and Walter (2005) put forward, sociologists need to ask themselves: are we prepared to engage in practical policy processes that affects peoples’ lives while knowing that such processes will be imperfect? Are we prepared to put forward anything other than deconstruction? Are we able to accept the second-best outcome as Shergold asks? And can we work with policy development processes that are not going to be fully open and participative certainly not formally and certainly not in the short term?
The sociology for what, who, where and how questions have relevance not just for our respective academic and client audiences, but also within our discipline. How do we communicate effectively with outsiders if a significant proportion among us is not adequately engaged with the other? How do we permeate public consciousness and challenge power structures, as Mensy and Burawoy advocate, if we don’t cooperate more directly with policy makers and institutions (including the ones that may not don’t fit in with social science values)?
Sociologists continue to grapple with the question of how to do sociology for people who are not sociologists, given that our discipline is primarily situated as an academic field. I’ve discussed the issues facing sociological practices in relation to four questions. First, sociology for what? This refers to the purpose and utility of sociology and the vested interest of groups that fund our work. Second, sociology for whom? This speaks to the different audiences and users of academic and applied sociological practices. Third, sociology for where? refers to the geographic and social location of the practitioner and their participants or clients. This question encompasses issues of embodied status and power. Finally, how do we practice sociology for particular groups in specific settings? This refers to clear, concrete examples which outline the process of applying theories, concepts, methods and principles in specific work contexts.
Sociological ideas are sometimes taken up by non-sociologists, but sociology has struggled to take control of how our methods and concepts are used in other fields. One way to address this is by becoming more aware of the who, what, where and how of different sociological practices. Another way to address this is by reducing the otherness of applied sociologists. Applied sociologists signify a bridge in between academic and public audiences. Our discipline might better off reconciling different sociological practices to better understand the nuts and bolts of social and institutional change.
This involves work on both sides. Academia can decrease the stigma attached to applied sociologists by having more empathy and respect for the reality of how applied sociologists work. This means listening and becoming educated about practitioners who inhabit different sociological spaces, rather than dismissing entire industries as a waste of sociological training. Applied sociologists need to find ways of sharing the what, who, where and how they practice sociology. Time and resources may exclude us from some modes of intra-disciplinary communication, such as face-to-face conferences and academic publishing, but it doesn’t exclude all opportunities to share our experiences. Academic and applied sociologists can decrease their distance by finding new ways of collaborating towards public sociology, so that together, we lift the public profile of our discipline.
Sociology needs to find innovative ways to feed the experiences of practitioners back to our academic colleagues. This might involve collaborating on projects or finding new platforms to share our work, including online, given that funding and timing prevents some of us from meeting face-to-face. Perhaps this means brining in more applied researchers into sociology classrooms to demonstrate how learning meets practice. I want to take this up in a later post on how to bridge the divide between academic and applied sociologies.
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