From Brian Dunning’s Where the Boys Are:
Lately I’ve been thinking about the gender inequality within the skeptical movement….
It seems to me that skepticism and UFOlogy are similar in that they can be largely practiced by Internet forum posting. In fact it seems to me that the mindsets of the two can easily blur. They’re both about searching the Internet for evidence, arguing that your evidence is better than the other guy’s, proudly calling oneself open minded and proclaiming the other guy closed minded, and doing it all from behind the safety of a computer monitor. Who sits at computer monitors all day long? Software engineers [plus, as one commenter noted, "Sys admins, managers, HR specialists, policy analysts, writers, graphic designers, accountants, librarians...."].
I’ve seen this pattern too many times to dismiss it, and I’ve seen enough women working in science, that I feel confident enough to form a hypothesis. The relative scarcity of women within the skeptical movement has nothing to do with any sort of disinterest in critical thinking or science by women. Rather, it has to do with the large dilution of software guys poured into the mix, to whom the everyday practice of web-based skepticism is really appealing. Among those who make skeptical outreach and science education their career (or a large part of it), I propose that women are, in fact, equally represented. It’s just that gatherings like The Amaz!ng Meeting also attract a large gallery of software guys, and give the appearance of gender inequality.
It’s an interesting hypothesis—though, as one commenter noted, the skeptical movement in North America was just as white-male dominated before consumer software existed, as it is now. But it still doesn’t account for why the contributions of women to skepticism are so rarely of the top-tier variety. This is a science-like field where what matters is your research and the caliber of your arguments and evidence. And, because no one actually gets directly paid for doing this stuff, and there’s nowhere you can apply for research grants, it’s not as though there’s some “glass ceiling,” with men “keeping them down.” So then why have the female CSICOP Fellows not done work just as impressive as the male ones? Merely diluting a field shouldn’t (and wouldn’t) affect that upper echelon.
Elizabeth Loftus has been an important voice in debunking “recovered memory” research … but how difficult is that? How hard-nosed and “merciless” do you have to be to cut through the shit, there? Sue Blackmore is most famous for being “the [paranormal-believing] sheep who became a [skeptical] goat” … and she is now totally into fairly unconstrained theorizing about memes and temes, in spite of the very legitimate questions (answered, somewhat, by Daniel Dennett in his Breaking the Spell) about whether such things can even be properly defined. Eugenie Scott is a big name in evolution—but not in terms of skeptical debunking, as such, outside of ID/creationism. Marilyn vos Savant is famous for being “the smartest person in the world” … but a contributing skeptic? Not that I’ve seen.
The egalitarian feminist Carol Tavris has published about how we fool ourselves, i.e., “mistakes were made, but not by me.” No big skeptical whoop.
Marcia Angell (critic of alternative medicine), Susan Haack (epistemological philosopher), Irmgard Oepen, Dorothy Nelkin (sociologist of science), Jill Cornell Tarter (SETI)—never even heard of ‘em.
Serious male skeptics (among the CSICOP Fellows), by contrast? With multiple books published debunking a wide variety of woo-woo? James Randi, Joe Nickell, Milbourne Christopher, Carl Sagan, Wallace Sampson, Paul Kurtz, James Alcock, Ray Hyman, Richard Wiseman, Philip Klass, and the late Barry Beyerstein. (Outside of that Fellowship list, for world-class level there’s also David Lane and Michael Shermer. Oh, and me. Comparably on the women’s side, there’s Meera Nanda—whose book inspired the title for Dennett’s—and Ophelia Benson… though both of them are closer to being simple atheists than actively contributing skeptics, as such.) Aside from Blackmore in her best moments, the rest of the female CSICOP-Fellow skeptics aren’t close to being in the same league, in quantity, degree of difficulty, or quality.
Brian goes on to remark, in the comments:
When we were casting The Skeptologists, we realized immediately that our “dream team” of Most Popular Skeptics was all white guys. We actually did the best we could to temper the cast with women and minorities who were (A) in or near Los Angeles, (B) Ph.Ds in the fields where we still needed a cast member, (C) had great new-media followings, (D) were skeptical [as if this could be optional!!!], (E) had great on-camera personalities and would work well on TV. As you point out, we were not as successful as we wish we could have been.
Hey, what did he just kinda sorta admit, there? Talk about “dilution.” (Yes, they’re talking about the “most popular” skeptics; but you get to be popular by doing the best work. Or maybe also by having a great set of tits—the job description wasn’t clear.)
Someone else noted:
One confounding factor in this kind of test would be the opportunities women have to enter engineering careers in different cultures.
Yeah, because the $500 scholarships which women were getting to go into engineering even twenty years ago (at the U of Manitoba) aren’t enough to overcome the (imagined) “opportunity barrier.” Sheesh!
Exercise for the reader: (i) Pick a minority—any “minority,” based on skin color, sex, sexual orientation, food group or anything else you like—and (ii) make up an excuse for why they’re not as successful as straight white men in the same field. Any excuse. Doesn’t matter whether it holds water. ‘Cause “holding water” is a male concept anyway. (Carol Tavris may have an opinion; for myself, right now I have to pee. Standing up.)
Man, at this rate, how long will it be before we have “diversified” teams of women- and minority-led “skeptics” who believe in every sort of woo-woo that the “patriarchal white men” who built this field thought they had already laid to rest?
A female commenter noted:
There is a part of the feminist community that rejects the objective scientific method as patriarchal and prefers feminine, subjective knowledge. This groundless dismissal of science seems as flawed as religious faith; both institutionalize willful ignorance.
Which still, however, does not explain why the top-tier work in skepticism is almost uniformly being done by men. White men. (Yes, there is work being done in India by non-whites, if you’re wondering, by the “Indian Randi” Basava Premanand, and others.)
Finally, a couple of doses of sanity, after what turned into a fair bit of female whinging about how they were too tired to go out to skeptical events after a full day’s work (which men don’t have to do?), or had to stay home and take care of the kids (’cause they’re not sharing/alternating that task with their male partners? whose fucking fault is that? you get clear on those rules and on sharing the 2 a.m. feedings before you have kids). First, this:
Just a theory, maybe more men are active in the skeptic movement because men feel the need to be “right” more strongly than women. (And that includes the [antagonistic] need to prove others wrong.) It is just a personal observation that, although I am quite the skeptic, I rarely argue with my friends (or anyone) about it.
A good point: You have to be hard-nosed, and uncompromising to the point of being “merciless” with wrong ideas.
And one good point deserves another:
The skeptic movement (in my experience) seems to be more concerned with going out and getting drunk than doing much else.
Well, if there’s one thing I can still believe in….
