This week, among other major news events, #womanspace exploded on Twitter.
What happened? The journal Nature published an article in a fiction column known as Futures called Womanspace. The article is sexist. Like real old-school sexist.
Womanspace is one of those articles that pretends to praise women but quickly winds up putting its foot in its mouth and being really offensive.
The best word to describe it is condescending.
It starts out with a "humorous" introduction in which the author, a male scientist and his male friend, both their heads in the clouds, assigned a shopping task by the friend's wife, busy cooking for them [eyebrows raised already I hope]. The two men are comically bad at it [because they are so good at science, it is implied]. The article talks a lot about the different shopping strategies of men and women, arguing that men hunt while women gather. This stuff is stupid, and is also discredited evolutionary psychology.
Then the article states its thesis unambiguously:
- women are good at shopping
- men are good at abstract thinking
It's puzzling since Nature so often writes editorials advocating gender equality in science.
The article was published in September, but for some reason did not make it big until this week. One reason is that few people read the perambulatory stuff in Nature. Unlike Playboy, most people really do read Nature for the Articles. Nature is the single top journal in most fields (often tied with another journal, Science). But all that other stuff, like the fiction pieces, still has the imprimateur of Nature.
Because Nature is the single most important journal in the scientific world (again, perhaps tied with Science) its editors possess the world's largest megaphone. When you speak into a megaphone, you do not have the option of whispering. With great power comes great responsibility. One of those responsibilities is not being sexist.
People can and will debate whether this article is truly sexist. It truly is. But even if you think it is not, the fact that so many readers, many of them women considering a career in science, interpret it that way means Nature needs to repudiate it. That comes with the territory when you have a megaphone.
Nature's editors have not, as far as I know, retracted it, or even explained themselves. A few months ago Psychology Today got into trouble over its sexist and racist articles published by blogger Satoshi Kanazawa. PT retracted the pieces, and PT and Kanazawa both apologized. Kanazawa was pulled from the blogroll. PT did the right thing. What will Nature do?
If this interests you, you should read the original piece. If you agree with me I hope you will email Nature's editor and the author of the article. I hope you will ask for two things: a retraction and an apology. You may need to explain why it is sexist, since they seem to not understand why. But it's important that they do.
There is too much sexism in science already.
Here are some good links for more info:
Dr Isis
Highly Allochthonous
Scicurious
Christine Wilcox
Janet Stemwendel
Drugmonkey
A collection of more stuff
