Could someone who understands academic stuff explain this to me please?

[noblegiraffe]

nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2467&context=tqr

The article is 'Are STEM syllabi gendered? A feminist critical discourse analysis'.

It says things like 'However, upon deeper review, language used in the syllabi reflects institutionalized STEM teaching practices and views about knowledge that are inherently discriminatory to women and minorities by promoting a view of knowledge as static and unchanging, a view of teaching that promotes the idea of a passive student, and by promoting a chilly climate that marginalizes women'

It talks about a masculine learning climate, where knowledge is imparted by an expert to a student, facts are to be learned and individual work is expected.

Am I missing something or is this just saying similar to 'maths isn't for girls because they prefer group work and essays'? Which hardly seems feminist to me.

Sciences is a system of human knowledge that attempts to explain material reality, often by predicting what will happen.

Material reality is everything that has a physical existence.

I'm lost!

I think I'll go back to maths, maths is easier than Mumsnet sometimes.....

I also think it's odd to put it as 'where I'm coming from.'

The word science has a specific and commonly accepted meaning. That is a fact.

If words just mean whatever any individual thinks they should mean, they no longer function as a way of communicating with other people.

I see. Thank you for the definition of material reality. I do not agree with your definition of science, but it helps me to understand where you are coming from.

As for maths being easier than Mumsnet, I think many things are easier than Mumsnet, and if you can do maths, I would imagine it would be easier than Mumsnet, probaby.

Shall we go over to Site Stuff and lobby for LaTeX embedding in Mumsnet posts, or Equation Editor, or something? That would be one way to derail a thread, I suppose.

Then the polite thing to do would be to give an alternative definition of what science is, or what material reality is.

Because I think you're being really patronising with all this 'my definition' and 'where I'm coming from' bullshit.

I don't know that science does have a specific and commonly understood meaning.
There's the scientific method. There are people who think a graph is "science". There's physics and equations and proofs. There's palaeontology and archaeology with hypothesis and conjecture that can never be proved right or wrong.
What about psychology? Science or not science? Very rigorous statistical testing of results but also lots of speculation about cause and effect.
I don't know. The more I think about it and the older I get the less sure I am that "science" is a useful term. Applying the scientific method and rigour around how research is conducted is more valuable to me.

Oh dear x post

Almonds definition is pretty close to the primary on in my dictionary www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/science , and seems about right to me too tbh.

I like it being defined as archaic knowledge
I think I'm just jaded from too long being mansplained "science" by idiots who think all women are thickos. And people who think a graph or some random "peer reviewed" fact must be correct.
Problem with the Internet is most people don't have the skills to correctly assess whatever source it is that they are using to support their argument. So I'm tending to think that knowledge of research methods and how to assess and critique information is growingly important and that's a skill that can be gained from lots of different disciplines.
Rambling. I'll always be a scientist at heart though

Science is what is done by scientists, so now all we need to argue about is whether self-identification by scientists is sufficient..................

I'm orf to the loo .

......And I think I just am archaic (creak, groan, where's the liniment! You can't even get proper liniment nowadays............) . TTFN.

Actually I think the last def in my dic was that it is an archaic definition of knowledge which isn't quite the same as being defined as archaic knowledge

(I'm not sure we're helping noblegiraffe much...)

I wonder what would happen if the author of that paper were to run their analysis on the syllabi of medical or veterinary schools?

Science is what is done by scientists, so now all we need to argue about is whether self-identification by scientists is sufficient.

Thank you SomeDyke

almond - I think SomeDyke's definition is closer to how I see it. There is a definition of science as a system of human knowledge or some kind of quest for a form of truth that you can all agree with me about scientists can all agree on, and then there is the messy reality of science as it is done by scientists. I am not sure that I would limit science to material reality either. The scientific method has been used to study processes that do not have their basis in material reality, such as thoughts, feelings, hopes and so on.

I find how different groups of people see the concept of science to be interesting. I tend to think of science more as the process, the method, and a way of thinking about the world, than something static. In part I think of science this way because of the way in which science moves, which is why I feel so strongly that a reference to a paper from 1991 about the language used to describe reproduction might not be the most relevant reference in 2016, except as a sort of comparator. What we know to be science now, is likely not to be science in twenty, fifty, a hundred, or two hundred years. What is thought of as science is time- and culture-bound.

I think a woman needs to keep in mind when reading these sorts of papers, is that postmodernism uses;

Obfuscation: it uses jargon in order to make it hard for others to understand what is being said, and therefore criticise it. At the same time this gives it an air of superiority and elitism.

Manipulation: it admits that power structures, and hierarchies exist, which make it seem appealing; but, rejects that power is concentrated in the hands of privileged static groups. It admits social constructivism exists, which also makes it seem appealing; but uses the fact it exists to claim everything is socially constructed. Therefore, "everything is relative", there is no truth, one idea is as good as another etc. This allows deeply unethical practices to be undertaken without criticism. So while this author may realise that men can invent things like "brain sex", they cannot oppose that theory. As it is just as valid as any other, because "everything is relative" etc.

Reversals: it claims that women are oppressed because they perform the female sex role. Not because they have been socialised into an inferior role, due to being born female. Hence the fixation on "gender oppression" (in the purest sense), as opposed to sex oppression. And trying to redeem the attributes associated with the female sex role. Which is why the author associates logic, facts etc with men and lack of facts and logic with females. She then can only conclude STEM is sexist because it contains facts and logic i.e. "manly attributes".

Gaslighting: it claims that classes of people do not exist anymore and can be "destabilised". This can only benefit the dominant group, never the subjected group. Unsurprisingly, this concept is usually only applied to women. Which means even though the author realises the teacher can use subtle manipulation, by using the word "we" to pretend to be on the students side. Pomo "feminists" are often blind to the fact that mtt's are using that exact manipulation, to also be part of a group they do not belong in.

Distraction: Pomo "feminists" focus on analysing language, as they believe power comes from, knowledge and knowledge comes from language. (Obviously, that is a flawed strategy, as dominant groups can oppress without saying anything at all.) And not all knowledge is gained through language. By getting women to focus on analysing language, women are missing the big picture. And it therefore, becomes just a distraction.

All these elements make it a highly manipulative ideology, clearly at odds with a class based analysis of feminism. It needs to be ditched, and replaced by a solid class based analysis of sex oppression. And a more pragmatic and ethical approach to social constructivism. Basically, what we had in the social sciences before this invaded.

So - scepticism about Pomo reinforced, perhaps it would be more helpful to giraffe and others dealing with the STEM sex differentials irl if we could find some other - dare I say - more scientific analyses of the whys and wherefores?

"Obfuscation: it uses jargon in order to make it hard for others to understand what is being said, and therefore criticise it. At the same time this gives it an air of superiority and elitism. "
Even Judith Butler admits this - although I think she said she wants to confuse to prevent people slipping into 'first-thought' standard ways of thinking.

Many Thanks Witching for the clear analysis. Given the first point, I was always confused as to what pomo theory actually was (since it seemed to resist so hard saying what it was!).

"Science is what is done by scientists..." I wasn't actually intending to be serious with this comment! Yes, that is what many scientists would say, given that most of us just do it, and therefore science is what we do, but we don't think too hard about what it is we are actually doing! Or perhaps more like, we know what it isn't when we see someone doing what isn't science!

Or perhaps more like, we know what it isn't when we see someone doing what isn't science!

This is the thing, I think. The older I get, the more I realise that a lot of what I used to think of science, could be better described as something else entirely, like marketing, or a fishing expedition, or wistful thinking, or self-promotion, or something like that.

Your comment about science being what is done by scientists reminds me of how sometimes people say that children are born scientists, a bit like they sometimes say that children are born artists. I am not sure that this is quite accurate. Perhaps humans, like all creatures, are born experimenters, but it takes years and years of training and practise and technique and keeping up with the literature and the gossip and so on to be able to spot your own biases well enough to do what might be considered good science, that is, science that will last, and become the foundation for the science of the future. Getting to the point where science like that gets done is such an endurance test for any given individual and that's before anyone mentions the gender stuff.

I remember one professor saying to me, when comparing Science and Nature, the journals, that "the science is better in Science". At the time I don't think I really understood what he meant by "better" science, but now I can sort of see what he might have been getting at, even if I am not sure that I agree with his sweeping conclusions about the journals.

Okay, I just don't have the brain capacity to read academical papers at the moment, but I do think the author could have a point. (Whether she actually makes it, I do not know.)

I do think that while there are some few objective truths, like 2+2=4, there's lots of things in "science" that are male-centric. Like in biology, you might learn things about the "human body" that only apply to the male body. And in maths, you might not be taught about the woman who really discovered this or that thing, because a man took the credit. Et cetera. The less provable the "facts", the more likely that it is influenced to patriarchy.
And I do think that language is a powerful tool of oppression, even though it of course is not the only tool, and cannot alone be used to dismantle oppression.

It talks about a masculine learning climate, where knowledge is imparted by an expert to a student, facts are to be learned and individual work is expected.

Well, treating knowledge as something to be learned and just accepted without thinking does reinforce patriarchy and other power structures, as it is exactly how those hierarchies are promoted. A less hierarchical way of learning where critical thinking is encouraged would be more feminist.
Nothing to do with women preferring group work, everything to do with uncritical acceptance of "facts" being something that always reinforces the status quo.

Hum. As a scientist I don't really care who discovered something - it should make no difference to the result. That's different from caring as a woman from a historical, cultural, political POV.

When if comes to 'the uncritical acceptance of facts' - actually, that's the exact opposite of what science is about, how the scientific method works. The realities of teaching science may require a certain amount of trusting experts to impart current knowledge and theories - but doesn't that apply to many other disciplines as well? And when learning science you do do experiments yourself - you don't just get taught Hookes Law by the teacher telling you, you do the experiment, plot the graph and verify it yourself.

Now, for sure there's a huge minefield when it comes to interpreting certain sorts of data (yeah, neurobollocks I'm thinking of you) but I'm not sure how much that comes into play at the school and undergraduate level though.

I would have thought that science, by it's nature, is a little more robust as regards blind acceptance of knowledge, precisely because of the experiment, test it yourself angle. I think the naming conventions in science/maths (Hookes law, the Higgs Boson, Noethers Theorem) need a little prod sometimes, because female students might be helped by realising that Emmy Noether was a woman. Plus using 'she' in all papers/books to make it clear that the default person could be a woman. Always pisses off my male colleagues, but there you go.

But there are still issues across many fields -- so medicine/biology/pharmacy where default test subject is male. History and social sciences, even stuff like computer science where facial recognition systems and similar hardware have the problem that the default computer scientist is young and male and white (hence systems that famously cannot recognise black men, or women, or older people). Also, the questions that aren't investigated because no one male even thought of asking them! But this is more about science being part of a patriarchal society (hence issues), rather than science-specific sex issues.................

yeah, neurobollocks I'm thinking of you

That is precisely what I meant by accepted definition of science!

As a scientist, I really don't care who discovered something - it should make no difference to the result

But it does make a difference who discovers something, not least because of how they do it, and what results can then follow and/or be replicated - science and discovery does not exist in an ethical and moral vacuum; who discovers something is a matter of power relations, ability to research, and the ethical framework which shapes what they research or do not research.