In times past, “sexism” meant unfair discrimination against someone on the basis of their sex, or else behavior that fosters stereotypical sex roles. Paying a woman less for the same work is clearly sexism, as is expecting a woman to stay at home and raise children instead of (for example) pursuing a career in medicine or science or aerospace. You get the idea.
These days, though, the idea of sexism has expanded to include any use of sexualized images which makes people uncomfortable in some given context, such as paintings of sexy women at an art show or artistic portrayals of sexy women on fabric, like so:
This shirt portrays women as things to be oogled at, at the least. How does that translate to a work environment? pic.twitter.com/BGCSEFp5xB
— Kelly Hills (@rocza) November 13, 2014
This shirt has raised a storm of outrage, but the meaning of the shirt itself seems unclear. If you believe the rage-mongers, the meaning of the shirt is plain enough. Dr. Taylor has allegedly “denigrated all the enthusiastic young women” who might have become scientists by implicitly admitting to finding artistic depiction of overtly sexualized gun-toting women both sartorially and morally unobjectionable.
Naturally, this is only one of many possible views. Here are a few others:
https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/533337820568383488
https://twitter.com/SexyIsntSexist/status/533366155474644992
https://twitter.com/ashtenthinks/status/533641705694982144
https://twitter.com/AmbrosiaX/status/533417480199626753
For the last twenty years, I’ve continuously worked with brilliant women who do science and engineering and mathematics, and I’ve never once subjected them to images of sexy people, except when we went out to the movies after hours. It never even occurred to me to post any of my sexy skeptic calendars up at the office, as we’ve all been thoroughly trained on the idea of creating a “hostile work environment” and why that would be bad for group cohesion and productivity. Not that there is anything wrong with those skeptics posing as sexy pin-ups per se but it seems fair enough to expect people to put away sexuality for a time, at least while serving in a traditional professional environment (as opposed to, say, an art studio or a tattoo parlor). As to the workplace culture of the European Space Agency, well, I have to assume that they take a more relaxed attitude towards human sexuality than their American counterparts, since they allowed that shirt into a carefully stage-managed event in the first place.
There remains a fair bit of conceptual space between “that shirt was exactly zero bad” and “that shirt was clearly a sexist affront to all women in STEM.” How about “wearing that shirt was obviously a bad idea for a high-publicity global telecast, but it probably will not increase the amount of unfair discrimination against anyone on the basis of their sex.” Or perhaps a more agnostic approach would be in order here, at least until we got some hard data on whether images of sexy pin-ups actually do make people less comfortable, on average.
Speaking of data, I’m going to take a science break and bask in the glow of unprecedented human achievement for awhile.
