{"id":3078,"date":"2014-11-16T11:42:02","date_gmt":"2014-11-16T17:42:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/?p=3078"},"modified":"2014-11-16T11:47:53","modified_gmt":"2014-11-16T17:47:53","slug":"getting-shirty-with-sexism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/2014\/11\/16\/getting-shirty-with-sexism\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting shirty with sexism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In times past, &#8220;sexism&#8221; 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\u00a0a career in medicine or science or aerospace. You get the idea.<\/p>\n<p>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 <a href=\"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/2014\/04\/20\/freezing-peaches-at-aacon\/\" target=\"_blank\">paintings of sexy women<\/a>\u00a0at an art show or artistic portrayals of sexy women on fabric, like so:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\">\n<p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">This shirt portrays women as things to be oogled at, at the least. How does that translate to a work environment? <a href=\"http:\/\/t.co\/BGCSEFp5xB\">pic.twitter.com\/BGCSEFp5xB<\/a><\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Kelly Hills (@rocza) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/rocza\/status\/532913623648468994?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 13, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.donotlink.com\/cgu6\" target=\"_blank\">plain enough<\/a>. Dr. Taylor has allegedly &#8220;denigrated all the enthusiastic young women&#8221; who might have become scientists by implicitly admitting to finding artistic depiction of overtly sexualized gun-toting women both sartorially and morally unobjectionable.<\/p>\n<p>Naturally, this is only one of many possible views. Here are a few others:<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/twitter.com\/clairlemon\/status\/533337820568383488<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/twitter.com\/SexyIsntSexist\/status\/533366155474644992<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/twitter.com\/ashtenthinks\/status\/533641705694982144<\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/twitter.com\/AmbrosiaX\/status\/533417480199626753<\/p>\n<p>For the last twenty years, I&#8217;ve continuously worked with brilliant women who do science and engineering and mathematics, and I&#8217;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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.donotlink.com\/cim1\" target=\"_blank\">sexy skeptic calendars<\/a> up at the office, as we&#8217;ve all been thoroughly trained on the idea of creating a &#8220;hostile work environment&#8221;\u00a0and why that would be bad for group cohesion and productivity. Not that there is anything wrong with those skeptics posing as\u00a0sexy pin-ups\u00a0<em>per se\u00a0<\/em>but it seems fair enough to expect people to put away\u00a0sexuality 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.<\/p>\n<p>There remains\u00a0a fair bit of conceptual space between &#8220;that shirt was exactly zero bad&#8221; and &#8220;that shirt was clearly a sexist affront to all\u00a0women in STEM.&#8221; How about &#8220;wearing that shirt was obviously\u00a0a 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.&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking of data, I&#8217;m going to take a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.esa.int\/Our_Activities\/Space_Science\/Rosetta\/Pioneering_Philae_completes_main_mission_before_hibernation\" target=\"_blank\">science break<\/a>\u00a0and bask in the glow of unprecedented human achievement for awhile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In times past, &#8220;sexism&#8221; meant unfair discrimination against someone on the basis of their sex, or else behavior that fosters&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3078\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/backgroundprobability\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}