Visual Sensibility

Joanne Manaster, who claimed that she love doing science, eventhough she used to be an international model. 

Anyway, if you’re a woman (or, okay, still a girl), you can read some articles I’ve found about woman in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) career, and controversies and stories behind why so few of them have it.

• Interview with Dr. Erika Ebbel, a “Princess Scientist” and former Miss Massachusetts (yeah, she graduated from the prestigious MIT)
• Women’s STEM Careers A Matter Of Choice, Not Ability, Study Suggests
• Women In Science: Why So Few? (VIDEO)
• Jane Goodall Talks Women In Science

And now is the questions: Why do I seem to take interest in this topic? Am I supporting the gender equality? 

To be honest, I don’t think I have a right to say much about the gender equality issue seeing that I don’t follow news about it. I just happened to stumble on to articles about the late Margaret Thatcher who was claimed by some people as inspiring and so on. I found that it’s interesting that Thatcher wasn’t really supporting the equality for women. Let me quote an article on Examiner on this:

However, it soon became clear that the Iron Lady was not interested in improving equality for women. She didn’tsee any reason to.

According to Dr Abigail Locke, senior reader in applied social psychology and a gender researcher at the University of Huddersfield, Mrs Thatcher fought her way from the status of grocer’s daughter to the highest political position in the land and believed other women could also achieve greatness by working hard.

Thatcher here didn’t support the feminism. She believed that if you’re a woman and you want to be treated equal in male-dominated field, then you have to do anything to make yourself equal. I wasn’t surprised knowing she’s called ‘bossy’ by her colleagues. It’s a kind of ‘compliment’ a woman who loves to control and who knows what she wants usually receives. Believe me, I had once called ‘bossy’ by my friends. They don’t tell me why, but I suspect that it’s have to do with me being used to privileges as the first child at home. Realizing the experience taught me a lot of lessons, I apologized to my friends for my old personality. I know that being too often and too much in controlis not healthy. Okay, we women will (mostly) be a mother and dominate in the household (for the greater good, of course) in the future, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have to communicate. When you don’t communicate things you have in mind in a good way, you will end up being called names. It’s because people don’t understand you, eventhough you offend yourself by saying it’s for the best. As a leader, there’s nothing wrong with asking your colleagues, “What do you think about [the topic]?” or “How about you?”, right?

So, what’s with the woman in STEM field topic then? Well, I’m here to express my opinion that I support gender equality in terms of career and work, but gender equality is nonsense to me if we’re talking about parenthood and other things outside career/work. To me, there’s no house-husband. There’s only housewife. And a husband. It’s, at least, what my religion and my mother taught me.

This relates to my next opinion about woman pursuing STEM, especially science, career. To me, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s also fine for me if the woman decides to pursue motherhood instead of tenure academic career. Not everyone is good in time management. Not everyone wants to be like Margaret Thatcher, who still wanted to excel herself in her career eventhough she’d had a wealthy husband already (that explained why she loved Denis Thatcher so much; that man was so supportive!). I don’t know what really happened in US or other countries, but in Indonesia, female scientists that I’ve known so far in Indonesia are only my lecturers, other lecturers in other universities, and ones who are employed in international NGO and multinational companies (e.g. oil and gas company). I don’t see a problem with this fact because I think there’s nothing wrong with choosing other options beside STEM, especially science. I admit science is hard, sometimes, and if you’re not dedicated to it, you’d likely fail, but there’s no hard feelings if the women don’t want it. I myself will be more likely to ask all younger generations, both male and female, to pursue science career because our country needs more innovations and we can help provide the basic principles to our engineer, techie, and mathlete friends and so on. Maybe you can provide me with better reasons why we should make more scientists for Indonesia here.

That’s it for now, I think.

Dr. Andrew Derocher in his respond to the fact that in February, Fox News repeatedly promoted a book by firefighter Zac Unger on his time in Churchill, Manitoba to claim that “the polar bears are doing just fine.” Even though bears in that region are actually among the subpopulations in decline, Fox News suggested that the book undermined climate science. Media Matters wrote that media should not rely on anecdotal information when there is “a lot of data” on sea ice and polar bear body condition.

Noted.

Dr. Andrew Derocher, a polar bear scientist working for Polar Bears International, in an article by Media Matters, “8 Tips From Scientists On Covering Polar Bears”. If you’re a fan of this marine mammal, I’d recommend you to read the article. Just in case someday you plan on going to Alaska, Canada, or other places inhabited by polar bears, you can act like a professional tourist.

This quote is actually a reminder for me that being a (marine) mammalogist is not about loving the physical features of the killer whales, dolphins, or the whales. It’s about measuring them and analyzing the data! It’s about working with MathLab, sometimes R, and sometimes excessive amount of Microsoft Excel rows and columns! Scientist is not like other person who can just stare at her/his laptop screen, admiring those doe eyes and other features of particular animals that scream cuteness.

And one other most important thing is that real scientists dont prove their credibility/capability in science virtually via social media. Their CV & contributions tell all. So, don’t rely heavily on social media! Tumblr is even just another media to promote yourself while the main thing is your own CV and real contributions that tell how many articles you’ve written, how many networks you’ve created, and so on. And remember that it’s much better having other people talk about you rather to having yourself talk about yourself. I’m writing this not to offend scientists using Tumblr or social media to upscale their own popularity, but I’m sure you will be much more pleased having earned real popularity instead of having the virtual ones. We’re still in 2013 anyway, not 2050.

Again, this is only a message for myself (and my possibly forgetting self in the future).