On “seeming like a scientist”

So, I finally watched the Doctor Who Christmas special the other day. Yes, I know, I’m about a month late here – but the part of the special that I want to talk about isn’t exactly Christmas-specific, so I’m going to talk about it anyway. If you’re similarly behind on Doctor-Who-viewing, be warned that this post contains spoilers for the 2014 Christmas special (but not for any other episodes or ongoing plot-lines).

What I want to talk about is the odd ideas the episode seems to have about what scientists are like. So, first a quick recap: much of the episode centres on a group of scientists at a polar research base. Since this is Doctor Who, the scientists and the Doctor are fighting the Monster of the Week; since it’s the Christmas special, Santa Claus is helping too. Shortly after the Doctor arrives, we get the following scene:

(Shona, one of the scientists, is talking to Santa Claus; questioning how the stories about him can possibly be true. As she walks away from Santa, writing in her notebook, the Doctor enters the room)
Doctor: “You alright?”
Shona: “Yeah, yeah yeah. I’m trying to talk sense into beardy-weirdy” (gesturing at Santa)
Doctor: “You don’t seem much like a scientist.”
Shona: “Well that’s a bit rude, coming from a magician.”

This begs the question of what a scientist is supposed to seem like, and how Shona apparently fails to meet these criteria. So, let’s review her actions in the episode up to this point and see if we can figure out where she failed the “seems like a scientist” test.

What does Shona do?	Is it something a scientist would do?
Expresses fear at the prospect of going into a genuinely-frightening-and-dangerous situation (facing the monster of the week) and tries to get out of having to do it.	Yes. Scientists are not emotionless robots; we’re allowed to have fears and not want to do scary things.
Admits that she hasn’t paid attention to the whole of the mission briefing (to be specific, she states that she remembers the briefing “until he put his hand on my knee; then I was just grossing”)	Yup! You don’t need a superhuman attention span to be a scientist (there’s a reason we write things down in lab books). The only person failing here is the male scientist who jeopardises the mission by choosing to sexually harass Shona instead of giving a decent professional briefing.
Dances to a cheesy Christmas song	Again, yes. Scientists are allowed to have (a) personalities and (b) fun. See above about not being emotionless robots.
Is revealed to have liked “My Little Pony” when younger, a revelation that Santa uses to humiliate her. Possibly-related: is female.	Yes on both counts. While women are still rarer than they should be in science, being female doesn’t prevent you from being a scientist, and neither does liking stereotypically girly things. (I’m female, a fan of My Little Pony, and a scientist. So far this combination of circumstances has not caused any world-ending paradoxes).
Expresses disbelief and scepticism when Santa shows up, saying “This is totally not happening” and asking “Am I dreaming?” [Spoiler: she is]	Very much so, and in most stories this would be treated as proof that Shona does seem like a scientist – she won’t believe in extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence, and instead correctly applies Occam’s razor to deduce that this is a dream.
Asks questions of Santa, probing his apparent impossibilities, and records his answers in her notebook	Absolutely! Science is allowed – in fact encouraged – to investigate strange and improbable happenings that it encounters. Shona’s questioning instinct in this situation makes her seem more like a scientist, not less like one.

It’s while Shona is asking questions of Santa that the Doctor strolls in and tells her she doesn’t seem like a scientist. Which is odd, to say the least: he interrupts her in a situation where she’s behaving like a scientist in order to tell her that she can’t be a scientist! I wonder what criteria for “scientist” he’s using; what set of traits someone would need to have before the Doctor and his scriptwriters would recognise them as a proper scientist. I highly doubt that I’d fit their stereotype.

Now, you could argue that we’re not meant to agree with the Doctor here – that he’s a fallible character and this is one of the times when he’s wrong. Unfortunately, the remainder of the episode really doesn’t seem to back up this interpretation. After all the characters come to the realisation that they’re dreaming, they also realise that they are not, in fact, scientists. As they wake up, Shona has this exchange with two of the other dreamers:

Shona: “I work in a shop.”
Ashley: “I’m sorry?”
Shona: “I thought I was a scientist. That’s rubbish.”
Bellows: “Finally, something that makes sense.”

But it doesn’t make sense. There’s absolutely no reason why Shona couldn’t or shouldn’t be a scientist.[1] Or almost no reason, anyway. The main possible reason I can see is that Shona may have been kept out of science by people telling her she doesn’t seem like a scientist.

It’s time to get rid of the ridiculous notion that there’s a certain strict formula for “seeming like a scientist”, and that anyone who doesn’t fit this formula can’t truly do science. In the real world, all sorts of people can and do perform science. The more we acknowledge this, the more talented potential-scientists will end up feeling as though it’s okay for them to pursue science. And if we want more innovation, that can only be a good thing.

 
 

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[1] In fact, I’d like to believe that she is one. In my personal headcanon, Shona works in a shop in order to help with her living costs while she studies for a PhD. The memories just came back to her in the wrong order – shop first, science later.

I want my jetpack: Why STEM’s woman problem affects everyone

So, I’ve talked about the dearth of women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths) fields. And I’ve talked about wanting to encourage little girls who think science is cool, and show them that they, too, can grow up to be scientists. But I haven’t talked so much about why this matters.

Obviously it matters to me. As a woman in science, I have a personal stake in the issue. But maybe you’re not in STEM yourself, or you’re a man, or both, and maybe these things make it harder to see why you should care about this issue.

Well, I have some suggestions on that topic.

Have you ever thought something along the lines of “it’s the year 2014, where’s my jetpack?” It doesn’t have to be a jetpack you’re waiting for. Maybe you want a cool Marty McFly-style hoverboard, or a flying car, or one that drives itself. Or perhaps, rather than a neat new gadget, what you’d really like is a solution to an existing problem. A Babel fish, or abundant clean fuel, or safe drinking water for everyone on the planet. Or how about a cure for a certain disease? Cancer, or HIV, or Alzheimer’s, or even just the common cold. If that’s not ambitious enough for you, maybe you’d like some immortality?

The exact nature of the scientific or technological advance you’re waiting for isn’t the point. The point is that most people have some wishlist items that can only come into existence via the efforts of people in STEM. I’d like you to pick one – the thing you most want STEM to deliver for you – and think of that thing. It’ll need an inventor, obviously. Someone whose brain can turn this idea into a reality. Imagine that this person is already out there, somewhere in the world.

…Now imagine that she’s given up her pursuit of STEM, despite her interest in the field, because cultural forces pushed her away from it. Or maybe those forces meant that she never developed an interest in STEM in the first place. Either way, instead of becoming a scientist or engineer, she’s entered a field that seems more welcoming to people of her gender. A field where she won’t have a chance to invent the thing.

I guess you’ll just have to keep waiting.

 

(And yes, this idea that there is One Person who could invent the thing is a glib oversimplification of the way inventions happen, used above only for rhetorical effect. The fact remains that the more good STEM people there are in the world, the greater the chances that STEM will produce a decent version of [particular thing] within [specific number of years]. Maybe if we hadn’t spent so long excluding half the population, we’d already have some of the items on our technological wishlists.)

Why I do science outreach (a selection of reasons)

Over the summer, I took a couple of days off work and spent a long weekend helping out on a science outreach roadshow. I first got involved with this outreach group when I was at university, and their roadshow’s been a regular feature of my summer ever since – this was my 5^th year. Why do I keep going back? Lots of reasons. The chance to hang out with a group of like-minded nerds (i.e. the other volunteers) is always good, and this year I spent some rather enjoyable time plotting potential future experiments with a fellow Materials Scientist. The experiments themselves are pretty enjoyable too, even from the perspective of a grown-up: a chance to play with fun science things like vacuum chambers, a chance to think about real-world uses of all sorts of scientific principles, sometimes even a chance to learn new stuff (did you know that there’s a security feature on banknotes which only shows up when you look at the note with an infrared camera? I didn’t!)

But the thing I enjoy most about the roadshow is the audience. The public events I helped out on this year were open to all ages, but most of the visitors were families with primary-school-aged children. Kids of this age, by and large, haven’t yet absorbed the idea that it’s “uncool” to enthusiastically like certain things. Science hasn’t acquired the stigma of nerdiness for them. These children are perfectly willing to engage, and when you show them an interesting new thing – like how they can build a bridge strong enough to walk across, or the way certain objects glow under UV light – they get genuinely excited. They declare it to be cool, and want to see more, and it’s so much fun knowing you showed them something they enjoyed.

I’d like to hope that these kids will always be willing express their genuine enjoyment for things, that they never feel as though their enthusiasm is something they need to hide. When it comes to enjoying science, I particularly find myself hoping this for the case with the girls in the audience, because I know – just look at the statistics – that they’re far less likely to end up pursuing science than their male counterparts. And it’s not for lack of ability (if it were, boys should be outperforming girls on science GCSEs: they’re not), nor some biologically-hardwired lack of inclination (if it were, there’d be a similar dearth of female scientists and engineers in other European countries: there’s not). It’s probably many things, because the world is complex, but one of the many things is a cultural perception that science is Not For Girls.[1]

It was refreshing, on the roadshow, to see girls who haven’t yet absorbed this message. A particular mention must go to the little girl who’d clearly dressed up specially for her visit – in an old adult’s white shirt that fell to her knees and looked like a child-sized labcoat, with a picture of the periodic table drawn by hand on the back. And bright pink shoes, because contrary to popular belief, you can enjoy stereotypical girl things and science at the same time. I hope that little girl remembers this fact as she grows up. I know there’ll be plenty of messages out there telling her (and all the other little girls like her) that science is not for her. But on the more positive side, I also know that a lot of efforts are being made to counter those messages. These efforts can be as big as a national event, or as small as individual people being visibly female and scientists at the same time. I fall into the latter category: I’m just one of many data points that says “actually, you can do this”, but I’m happy to be a data point. And that’s another very good reason to keep doing science outreach.

 

 

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[1] The ubiquity of this perception was brought home to me in a meeting earlier today: three people in a room, all female scientists, discussing future options for a work project. Somehow we all ended up referring to the hypothetical researcher-doing-the-future-science as “he”, because that felt like the natural thing to do. Even as women in science, we still carry the idea that science is mainly something for men.

An update on “To my professional institution…”, in which said institution responds

My post this morning on National Women In Engineering Day (and in particular, my disappointment with the way IoM3, my professional body, had chosen to mark it) received a response from IoM3’s twitter account. In the interests of fairness and debate, I feel I should post this response here. It said:

“Hi, I’m sorry you feel disappointed by our event. We have held two WIE events before and part of the idea of this one was to engage with men more and have a better balance. Our event was organised by women including @SarahBoadIOM3. I hope you can attend.”

I do appreciate feeling like I’m listened to, and the fact that the organisers’ perspective was offered. However, I’m still not entirely satisfied by this. Striving for balance may be a good thing, but this event isn’t happening in a vacuum, and the majority of engineering events are heavily male-dominated. This means that this attempt at “balance” is taking away one of the rare opportunities for female engineers to have a platform, in favour of the men who already have a multitude of such opportunities. In trying to be balanced, it’s failing to redress a current imbalance.

On the other hand, “this doesn’t happen in a vacuum” also applies to the fact that IoM3 has held previous WIE (which I assume stands for Women In Engineering) events before, and that these have presumably had more female-dominated panels. Knowing this does soften the negative impact of this particular event’s gender composition, in the same way that individual works of fiction failing the Bechdel test would be less of an issue if there were a multitude of other works passing that test. The more often you see well-represented women (or any other group, for that matter), the less harmful it is on occasions where this representation is lacking. In the same vein, it’s good to know that women organised this event. And engaging with men is definitely a valuable goal – if you want to dismantle the cultural barriers to women entering engineering roles, then addressing the mindsets of the men who’ll be working alongside (and sometimes hiring) these women is definitely important.

The question that remains is whether the men on the panel were chosen simply to give a sympathetic male perspective, or whether they’re there because of the idea that some members of the engineering profession need male presenters before they’re willing to listen. If it’s the latter, I’m still just as disappointed as I was this morning – but for a whole new reason.

To my professional institution: this is not the celebration I’m looking for

Did you know that today is National Women In Engineering Day? This fact may not be particularly relevant to you personally, depending on your gender and field of work. It does, however, matter a fair deal to me. I’m a woman working for a large technology company, one where approximately three-quarters of the workforce (including myself) are either engineers or scientists. Of those, the vast majority are men. In my current team of around ten people, I’m the only female employee.[1] This is not particularly surprising: in fact, if you look at the statistics on women in engineering, you’ll learn that one out of ten is actually a slight overrepresentation. The UK engineering workforce as a whole is only 7% female, around one woman in every fourteen engineers. If we expand our definition to look at women in all STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) jobs, we still only get 13% women, just over one in eight.

These numbers are shockingly low. In fact, the UK is the worst country in Europe for representation of women in engineering.[2] This may be in large part related to subject choices: fewer girls take STEM subjects at A-Level; fewer pursue STEM options into further or higher education. And no, the difference can’t be explained by boys having “more innate talent” for these fields – at GCSE level, girls’ performance is comparable to boys’ in all STEM subjects (and this isn’t just a selection-bias effect of comparing a small number of exceptionally-good-at-STEM girls to a larger number of less-exceptional boys, either: maths GCSE is compulsory as part of the core curriculum, and there’s no longer any gender gap when it comes to science GCSEs, so we’re comparing similar numbers of boys and girls here). So why do so few women end up in STEM careers? As is so often the case, the reasons are complex, but culture and stereotypes definitely play a large part. The perception that Engineering Is Not For Women exists, and this perception needs to be challenged.[3]

So I’m glad we have a National Women In Engineering Day, described by its originators as “a day dedicated to raising the profile and celebrating the achievements of women in engineering”. Because, despite the gender disparity, women are making valuable contributions right now, and this needs to be acknowledged. Too often in history, women’s contributions to STEM have been glossed over,[4] and this only furthers the misconception that STEM fields are men-only. If we want to invite more women in, then showing them what they can do is a good place to start. I also applaud the day’s stated aim “to spread the word that engineering offers as many opportunities for women as men”, even if potential hiring biases mean this might not be entirely true. What can I say, I’m an idealist.

Therefore, I was pleased when I learned that IoM3, the professional institution to which I belong, has decided to mark this day with a celebration of its own.[5] And then I looked at the details of the event. And… oh dear. I feel as though the point has been missed a little.

They’ve entitled it “Engineering Success” and promised to give “the employee / employer perspective of the success of women in engineering”. The “employee perspective” is given by a woman who’s very accomplished in her technical field: so far, so good when it comes to celebrating women’s contributions and showing what they can do. So now let’s turn to the “employer perspective”. Since we’re meant to be showing that engineering offers as many opportunities for women as men, I’d expect to see a female employer here, showing that women can make it to the top of the management heap in engineering companies, and having her success in a less-technical but still engineering-related realm celebrated. But no, the employer perspective comes from a man. Okay, his group of companies employs a very respectable 46% of women, so I can sort of see the reasoning behind picking him, although I also note that no word is given on how this 46% splits between the various job families. I’d like to see more detail in these stats: if HR, PR, administrative functions and the like are female-dominated with the technical jobs still being overwhelmingly-male, I’m not going to be impressed. And either way I’ll still be disappointed that they couldn’t fit in a female employer as well. But never mind, let’s turn to the chair. On a day dedicated to celebrating the success of women, I’m sure they’ve found a highly distinguished female engineer to chair this event. Oh wait, my mistake. It’s chaired by Mark Miodownik. And I mean no disrespect to Professor Miodownik here: I’m sure he’s very good at chairing events. I just question whether his gender makes him the right choice to chair this one.

When half your hosts, half your speakers (arguably the more powerful half) and your chair are all male, what you’ve got is a rather lacklustre celebration of women’s successes. And when it comes to showing women and girls the opportunities that exist for them, you may be accidentally sending the wrong message. Because this arrangement of chairman and speakers seems to be saying, “Ladies, it’s fine for you to enter engineering. Look, here’s someone else who’s done it! But you need to know your place. The spots at the top are still only for men.”

 

 

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[1] Unless one of my colleagues really isn’t telling us something.

[2] If my father is reading this, he may be pleased to know that Cyprus, his country of origin, comes out of the comparison fairly well – topping the European league tables with nearly 30% of its engineers being female. In other words, somewhere between one in four and one in three. It’s still not exactly gender parity, but it’s a lot better than what we’ve got here.

[3] And not by making engineering pink, either.

[4] For one randomly-chosen example, compare the number of people who’ve heard of Watson and Crick to those who’ve heard of Rosalind Franklin, whose work was vital to discovering the structure of DNA.

[5] In case that page gets taken down after the event in question, an internet archive version of it is available here. This is relevant, because I’m about to start discussing the page’s contents.

A quick update on the Brother 3 Reading Situation, or what happens when you talk about books

Way back* in my second-ever post here, I talked about Brother 3’s reading habits. Specifically, his history of reading books traditionally pigeonholed as “girly”, the fact that he was doing this less as time went on, and my worry that the aforementioned pigeonholing was starting to push him away from certain stories. Stories he might enjoy, and stories that might help him develop the always-important skill of seeing the world from the perspective of people who aren’t similar to him, but stories packaged in a way that screamed “not for you”. Because when publishers see a female author and a female protagonist, they so often assume that the story is only for female people. And they present it accordingly, even though in reality, all stories should be for everyone.

My attempted solution at the time was to buy him a Kindle, removing the girly-cover obstacle. This didn’t have much of an effect: he never reads the thing. What did have an effect was hanging out with him in the California sunshine and chatting. He asked about my Kindle, and his Kindle, and whether I thought he should read the books on his Kindle, and which of them I’d read myself, and what else the authors had written, and what happened in those books… and then, apparently, he went home and took a book off the bookshelf in my old bedroom, one that he’d liked my potted summary of, and now he’s reading that book. And this is its cover.

Take a look at that cover for a moment. It’s got all the features of a Designated-Female book. Headless girl? Tick. Pastel colours? Tick. Loopy, feminine font? Yup, tick again. This is not the sort of book cover that’s designed to be enticing to boys, and I’m so proud of my brother for being willing to read it anyway.

I’m also a little ashamed of myself. I thought that giving him the Kindle would encourage him to read more of these books. Typical geek misconception, I suppose, believing that technology will solve everything. But it took me a whole year to sit down with him and have a proper conversation about the books on that Kindle. And almost as soon as we’d had that conversation, he picked up one of my old books and started to read it. So let this post be a reminder of what should have been obvious: when it comes to reading diversely, access is not the whole story. You also need to talk about the books.

 

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* “Way back” in the time-elapsed-since-then sense, not in the number-of-intervening-posts sense. I’m not the most regular of bloggers.

It’s only “mature” because you made it that way

(Note: this post contains mild spoilers for Long Live The Queen. Some possible in-game events are revealed; how to make these events happen is not.)

So Brother 1 is getting married this weekend, which means that I and all my immediate family are currently in California, where the wedding is to be held. There’s a fair amount of downtime to be filled, some of which Brother 3 has spent playing Long Live The Queen on my laptop.* Which got me slightly into trouble the other night, when my parents found out that his character, Crown Princess Elodie, had conducted a lesbian romance. A very-briefly-depicted lesbian romance, consisting of one love letter and one decision to return the other girl’s affections, all conveyed via textual description. This is, apparently, “mature content” that makes the game “unsuitable” for my 12-year-old brother.

Elodie also forced another character to marry against her will, hired a spy, risked her life (and someone else’s) in the pursuit of glory, let another person damage her castle & kill her guards so she could get something she wanted, and ordered the assassination of a relative. No word yet on how these events affect the game’s suitability. But a lesbian relationship, that’s clearly unacceptable.

The game doesn’t even let you marry her.

And maybe that’s part of the problem. Because Brother 3 understands the concept of two people getting married, and there’s absolutely nothing “mature” about that concept. We talk about Brother 1’s wedding in terms of the love between him & his fiancée and their desire to share a future, not in terms of the sex life they’re going to have. But remove the marriage option, and how do you explain it to a child? I don’t mean “explain that these two people who love each other are of the same gender”, I mean “explain that these two people who love each other aren’t allowed to form the same commitment that Brother 1 and his fiancée can”.

This, of course, is arguing in favour of marriage equality, not in favour of denying the existence of gay relationships. But we’re currently in a place where that battle’s already been fought, and won. Once we leave California, we’re going home to another place where same-gender marriages are already happening. These things are – thankfully – part of the world now, and it’s fruitless trying to hide that fact.

What, then, is so different about a relationship between two people of the same gender? What makes it so much more “mature” than any other romantic pairing? How do you explain the fact that some people are still opposed to the marriages resulting from such relationships?

I’ve heard the argument that marriage is all about childrearing; that gay relationships are inferior because they can’t result in babies. It strikes me as a ridiculously reductive view of marriage: taking the entirety of the experiences that comprise a life together and boiling them down to one act of procreation. It also sets up a false dichotomy when it contrasts the baby-making straight couples with the non-baby-making gay couples. Some opposite-gender couples cannot have children: infertile people exist. Some same-gender couples can: trans* people exist too.

There’s another problem with focusing on the procreation. As I’ve already stated, we can talk about love and relationships without going into the mature content stuff. Disney does it all the time. But as soon as we turn the spotlight onto the question of “can they have babies?”, we force discussion to centre on the sexual act. We take something that really doesn’t need to be a “mature” topic and we turn it into one.

The other main “argument” I’ve heard is the one which doesn’t even seek to justify itself, simply points to the word “religion” and acts as though that’s sufficient explanation. The other night this took the somewhat-surprising form of my atheist father arguing that “various world religions are against it, so there must be something wrong with it”. Let’s leave aside for the moment the fact that various world religions have in the past been used to justify everything from slavery to anti-Semitism to racial segregation, and have mostly managed to move on from those deplorable positions without losing all their adherents. Let’s consider only the question of what religion has to say today, on this one issue.** And let’s consider it thoroughly and fully, because I’m sick of this conversation being dominated by the homophobic religious voices. Sick of people envisaging a spectrum with “God hates fags” at one end, and “there’s no problem with gay people, as long as they never act on it” at the other. The spectrum goes so much further than that. Into the realms of people who take St Paul seriously when he talks about how all are equal in the eyes of Christ. Who are willing not only to endorse gay marriages, but to fight for their right to do so – believing that not being allowed to endorse these marriages restricts their freedom of religion. So when we talk about the religious perspective on homosexuality, please, let’s bear in mind the full diversity of religious voices on this subject.

But what about the Bible, I hear you say. Doesn’t the Bible say that gay relationships are wrong? Well, no. Not exactly. Every Bible passage that deals with homosexuality talks about it in terms of the sexual act. Every. Single. One. Possibly the best-known “anti-gay” Bible story, that of Sodom and Gomorrah (where we get the word “sodomy” from, for goodness sake), is about an attempted gang rape. I hope you don’t need me to clarify that gang rape is bad regardless of the genders of those involved. The Bible also contains scenes where a gang of men rape a woman, and where these men are punished, yet nobody uses these scenes to argue that heterosexual couples are sinful. Nobody takes the many Bible passages that prohibit some sexual act between a man and a woman and uses them as “evidence” against the very concept of heterosexual relationships. Because when it comes to heterosexual relationships, people accept that there’s a lot more to it than what a couple might or might not do in bed. But gay couples somehow don’t get afforded the same consideration. Time and again, people choose to focus in on their sex lives and only their sex lives.

So maybe teaching my brother about the existence of gay relationships is “inappropriate” after all. I mean, if everyone’s so determined to equate gay relationships with gay sex, it leaves far fewer options for teaching children about the former without also invoking the latter. But why must we equate the two? I suspect it’s mainly the doing of people who want an excuse not to acknowledge gay relationships. If you forcibly sexualise something, you can then avoid talking about it by claiming that it’s inappropriate subject matter. But it’s only inappropriate because you made it that way. And you do not get to control the conversation. Let’s leave aside the sex for a minute, and talk about love.

 

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* Plug goes here: I love this game. I love the depth of the worldbuilding and the fact that replay after replay, more of the story is revealed. I love the way there are multiple valid approaches to navigating nearly every in-game challenge. I love the flawed characters and the way everyone is up to something. And I love the fact that I can have interesting, thoughtful conversations with Brother 3 about the game’s contents – those sort of conversations are normally far too rare where he’s concerned.

** I’m going to be talking mainly about Christianity, simply because it’s the religion I’m most acquainted with. As far as I’m aware, most of the general points apply in a large number of religions beyond Christianity, although the specific examples I’m giving will be Christian ones.

This, too, is a feminist act

(Content notes for rape and rape culture, gendered violence, all sorts of fun examples of patriarchy at its worst. Yeah, sorry. Hopefully I’ll have a lighter, fluffier post soon, but first allow me to talk about why the light-and-fluffy posts matter…)

“What happened to your blog?” my mother asks me. “I used to enjoy reading it.”
“Really?” I say. “I thought it would be too feminist for your tastes.”
“I didn’t think it was feminist,” she replies. “Well, I suppose there was that one post about that woman in Texas….

For the record, “that woman in Texas” would be gubernatorial candidate and filibustering hero Wendy Davis. She definitely qualifies for the title “Feminist Icon”, and the post I wrote about her centred around the need for safe, legal, accessible abortion. This is, to state the blindingly obvious, something of a major feminist issue. We’re talking about a situation where women’s lives hang in the balance.

But you know what? Something doesn’t have to be a literal manner of life or death before it becomes a feminist issue. It just has to involve a situation wherein some people have more unearned privilege than others. When we’re talking about issues that can cause death and debilitation – things like unsafe abortions, or domestic violence, or FGM – that privilege disparity is not only vital to address, it also tends to be a lot simpler to spot. It’s easy to find someone who agrees that these things are terrible and should be stopped. It’s somewhat harder to find this agreement when talking about the context in which these things occur.

Because these horrors do not exist in a vacuum. Nor is there a dichotomy between the “real” feminist issues like these, and “distractions” like examining gender sterotyping in videogames, or picking apart the problematic messages in a well-known book series, or pointing out how rape jokes permeate our culture, because these things are not distractions at all. They’re important parts of the picture.* The jokes which are the tip of the rape culture iceberg, normalising an act of horrendous brutality and twisting our perceptions of it until it’s seen as just a bit of fun, a crime so easily dismissed with boys-will-be-boys and she-wanted-it-really arguments. Easy even to erase the victim entirely, her pain irrelevant in comparison with the perpetrator’s gratification: take the ex-coworker of mine whose response to news of a potential rape was not “was she okay?” but “was she hot?” The games that reinforce the idea of women as trophies to be won. The character design choices that present “female” as a complete personality, as though that’s all there is to a woman. As though we’re all interchangeable – an attitude I’ve sadly encountered in real life, where the flaws of Stereotypical Woman are assumed to be flaws shared by all womankind. All women are bossy, so their requests should be treated as onerous.** Women never say what they mean, so when she tells you to stop, she really wants you to carry on.*** Women are irrational and need a nice logical man (or several) to make their decisions for them. Like a room full of men voting on a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. Like a woman’s male partner demanding that he be allowed to control her finances, her clothing, how and with whom she spends her time… and be allowed to dole out punishment if she disobeys.

I’m not saying that any one sexist comment, or story, or game, directly causes rape or violence against women or anything like that. But they are both symptoms and reinforcers of the culture in which these things occur. Even if they seem harmless in isolation: the reality is that nothing exists in isolation, and we need to look at the bigger picture. No single drop of water causes the devastating flood, but they all play a part.

So when I talk about pink covers with headless girls on them, I’m talking about one example of a much wider system that pressurises people of all genders to stay within their rigidly-defined Gender Boxes. When I talk about hunting for protagonists outside the “straight white male” demographic, I’m talking about one example of a culture in which the experiences of straight white men are seen as more worthy of attention and accolades. When I talk about the team behind Doctor Who casting yet another white man as their title character, I’m talking about one example of a world that affords fewer opportunities to women and people of colour. All of these add up to the necessary-and-sufficient condition for “feminist issue” which I mentioned above: an imbalance of unearned privilege.**** And when I point out this imbalance, or go up to publishing industry professionals and question the segregation of “girl books”, or make sure my brother has access to stories of people less privileged than him, those are feminist acts.

So let me be entirely clear on what I’m doing here. I’m talking about matters of disparity. I’m talking about action taken to redress these matters. These things might not always be of the same magnitude as the obvious “big feminist issues”, but that doesn’t change the fact that they exist on the same spectrum. So yes, this blog is feminist. And I’m proud of that fact.

 

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* And the content creators I just linked to all have my deepest respect. If I can grow up to be half as awesome as these women, I’ll be very satisfied.

** Happened to me several times. The example that most sticks out in my memory was probably a work situation in which a male co-worker asked me to make him some tea, then accused me of being “bossy” when I pointed out that I was in the middle of an important task and he was capable of making it himself.

*** Also happened to me, although it could have been much worse. He listened to “stop” the second time (and expressed surprise when I realised I actually meant it). I’m aware there are men out there who don’t. I was lucky.

**** You may note that I don’t say anything about this imbalance necessarily aligning with gender, and that several of my examples include race as a factor, while the posts I’ve linked to also touch on weight, disability status and sexuality, to name a few. Once again, examining the wider picture is important here: the disadvantages affecting women do not exist in isolation from those affecting other groups, a fact which becomes particularly obvious when you consider that these other groups also contain women. Therefore, now and always, My Feminism Will Be Intersectional Or It Will Be Bullshit.

Thoughts on the Twelfth Doctor

(Ware! Doctor Who spoilers ahead!)

So the makers of Doctor Who have announced who’ll be playing the Twelfth Doctor. There’s been a lot of lead-up to this, and a lot of speculation about who it might be. Since the series has established on-screen that regeneration can change a Time Lord’s skin colour or even their gender*, the pool of possible actors for the next Doctor was a lot larger than it would be for many roles. There’s even examples of a Time Lord being able to control their regeneration and choose a specific appearance, which may be the appearance of someone they’ve previously met – meaning an actor who’d already had a major role in Doctor Who would still theoretically be able to play the Doctor. It could have been anyone.

So I’m a little disappointed (albeit not particularly surprised) that after all the hype about how it might finally be time for the Doctor to be played by someone other than a white guy, they’ve chosen… yet another white guy. For the twelfth time. (Well, technically for the thirteenth). Nothing against the guy they’ve chosen – I’m not familiar with his work, but I’m sure he’s a great actor who’ll do a wonderful job with the role, and I do like the fact that he’s apparently a longstanding fan of the series. But I’ve talked before on this blog about how problematic it is for the vast majority of protagonists to be white guys, as though nobody else deserves the role of “hero”. This isn’t the 1960s any more, and there are plenty of talented people out there who are non-white and/or female, fans of the show, and more than capable of being an excellent Doctor. Why not give the role to one of them?**

Steven Moffat, executive producer of Doctor Who, was kind enough to address the “why not a woman?” question during the show in which the next Doctor’s identity was announced. No wait, just kidding, he didn’t address it at all. Instead he made a joke about how he “thinks it’s time the Queen was played by a man”. Because obviously there’s no difference between a real person with an established gender and a fictional character with an established ability to change gender! More gallingly still, he made this joke literally fifteen seconds after reminding the audience of this established ability to change gender. So not only does he seem to consider the “why not a woman?” question unworthy of an answer, he also seems to believe that his audience aren’t paying any attention.

(Incidentally, Stephen Hawking’s contribution – yes, they had Stephen Hawking on the show, a fact which I found totally awesome – was “it would make a change if the next Doctor was a woman with a male assistant”, accompanied by a great little smile. You tell them, Hawking.)

One argument I’ve heard is that having a female Doctor would “change the dynamic of the show too much”. This argument makes little sense to me, as the dynamic of the show already changes whenever the actor does. Every incarnation of the Doctor has a different personality and style from previous Doctors, but once we’ve watched them step out of the TARDIS and save the planet a couple of times, we’re perfectly willing to accept them as the Doctor. Why should it be any different with a woman? We may tend to have slightly different proportions, but we have the same range of possible personalities. We’re not a different species.

Another argument is that a female Doctor would “have to be a lesbian”, and that the writers don’t want to include that. Which is an odd assumption to make, because the writers have shown themselves perfectly willing to include lesbians elsewhere in the show. But say they didn’t want to write a lesbian Doctor. They wouldn’t have to. The most recent episode felt like a clear farewell to River Song, the Doctor’s wife, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we never saw her character again. Many of the previous Doctors have been apparently asexual. And let’s face it, the Doctor’s sexuality and love life are among the least interesting facets of their character. It’s a kids’ show about an alien who saves the universe; we don’t need to know who they want to kiss.

I haven’t seen or heard any arguments about why the Doctor has to be white, presumably because such arguments would be obviously horribly racist. And yet apparently 23% of people still consider the Doctor’s whiteness to be important. I strongly hope that the makers of Doctor Who aren’t among them, but I’d like to see more evidence, and today’s announcement hasn’t given me any.

 

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* Indeed, the last time the Doctor regenerated, he briefly thought he had regenerated as “a girl”. So the series hasn’t just established that gender-changing-on-regeneration happens for a few rare Time Lords: it’s established that it’s a possibility for the Doctor.

** In addition to not getting the role, these people weren’t even given a chance at the role – there was no audition held. Instead, the writers picked someone they liked and asked them to be the Doctor. Given that the last Doctor was played, and played well, by a previously-unknown actor, I feel like they’ve risked missing out on some great potential talent by taking this approach. Plus it’s an approach that exacerbates the white-male-protagonist problem, because the majority of actors who the writers already know to make good protagonists will be white males, because see above about how we have a white-male-protagonist problem. It’s perpetuating a vicious cycle.

Wendy Davis is my new hero

(I’d intended to blog about this earlier, right after the filibuster, but I’ve been rather busy lately. However, the stuff I’m going to talk about is still important, and will continue to be important, so I may as well say it now. Content note: “pro-life” bullshit, miscarriage, preventable death)

Last week, lawmakers in Texas tried to enact a bill that both angers and terrifies me. Most Texans do not support the bill in question, but this is apparently irrelevant to the people who supposedly represent those Texans. This bill, SB-5, would introduce a whole raft of restrictions to abortion access. New rules on the requirements a facility must meet to perform abortions would force nearly 90% of Texas abortion clinics to close, meaning many women would have to travel hundreds of miles to access abortion care. The bill would limit access to “abortion-inducing drugs”: note that many anti-choicers consider the morning-after pill to fall into this category (in defiance of the scientific fact that this is not how it works), so it’s possible that this could also make it harder to get hold of emergency contraception. And it would outright ban all abortions beyond 20 weeks of pregnancy, again based on bad science.

Now, abuse of science does have tendency to make me angry, but it’s only a small part of what angers me about SB-5. What makes me angrier by far is the fact that the 20 week ban provides no exceptions for rape. That it gives no exceptions for women who would otherwise face permanent disability, unless it can be proven that the women’s lives are in danger. That it would criminalise desperate women in dire circumstances, and that, when combined with the restrictions on abortion facilities, it would make abortion nigh-impossible for any woman to obtain.

What terrifies me is the fact that when I say, “abortion would be nigh-impossible to obtain”, I’m really only talking about the kind of abortion that’s safe and legal. The other kind, the unregulated and dangerous kind, will still be there. And desperate women, with no other options in sight, will turn to this as their last remaining hope. Some of them will die because of it.

There are other women who will die, too. Women who want children, but whose pregnancies go wrong. Take the case of Savita Halappanavar. When she begged doctors to terminate her pregnancy, it wasn’t because she didn’t want the baby. It was because she had already lost the baby she wanted, and now she was miscarrying and in pain. But her fetus, while non-viable at that point, still had a heartbeat. Since abortion is illegal in Ireland, doctors refused to remove the fetus until the heartbeat stopped. They waited several days; days in which Mrs Halappanavar’s cervix remained dilated. From an infection risk standpoint, this is equivalent to an open head wound. Mrs Halappanavar developed septicaemia and died. Had doctors been allowed to remove Mrs Halappanavar’s fetus when she arrived at the hospital, she likely would have lived. Ireland’s abortion laws theoretically allow exceptions when the mother’s life is in danger, but as far as I understand, Savita Halappanavar’s life was not in danger at that time of initial arrival. Her life only became endangered when the inaction of doctors allowed her to contract a potentially fatal infection. So exceptions “only if the woman’s life is in danger” just aren’t good enough. They don’t provide a sufficient safety net.

Under abortion bans, a woman trying to become pregnant is not safe. Pregnancy is always risky, but an abortion ban makes those risks so much larger. If her wanted pregnancy turns lethal, she might find that her doctors are unwilling or unable to help.

Under abortion  bans, a woman trying to avoid pregnancy is not safe. No method of contraception is 100% effective (not even abstinence, since deciding to abstain does not provide magical protection against rape). If she does become pregnant, she has one of two choices: risk her life on an unsafe abortion, or be forced by her government to carry and birth a child against her will. (Which, again, could result in lethal complications for which she cannot get help. And this is supposed to be “pro-life” how?)

Under abortion bans, no fertile uterus-owner is safe. Whatever we do, we cannot win.

Which is why Wendy Davis is my new hero. Last week, she stood up in the Texas senate, ready to filibuster this horrific bill into oblivion. She did this knowing that she might face repercussions: her office was firebombed last year shortly after she participated in a Planned Parenthood rally; her response was, “It’s a sad but true fact of public service that we have to feel concerned sometimes for our personal safety. But we can’t let that stop us.” So she didn’t let it stop her. She stood, and she spoke against the bill for nearly 11 solid hours. The rules of filibustering meant that she could not stray from the subject of the bill during that time. She also was not permitted to eat, drink, take bathroom breaks, sit down, or even lean on her desk for support. What she did was a massive feat of endurance and dedication.

She’d initially planned an even larger feat: her intention was to go for 13 hours, but she was forced to stop by her opponents after 11. And at this point in the evening, it became clear that Wendy Davis wasn’t the only hero in the Texas senate. Because her allies continued to stall the vote on the bill: asking questions, raising points of order, making speeches of their own. At quarter to midnight, the public gallery joined in: when they erupted in cheers over a remark made by Senator Leticia Van de Putte, the noise level in the senate became too high for senators to take the vote that would have moved the bill forward. This vote did eventually occur, but not until after midnight: too late to be valid. Too late for the bill to come into law. So everyone in that chamber who stopped it: they’re my heroes. And everyone outside the chamber who contributed their stories – public testimony read by Wendy Davis as part of her filibuster, a powerful demonstration of just what the bill would mean to the lives of women – they’re my heroes too. Each one of them played a part in making it happen.

But apparently that wasn’t enough. Because almost immediately, Governor Perry announced another special session for the Texas Legislature. This session will include SB-5, and will last for 30 days: far too long for a filibuster to prevent this a second time. It started today.

I don’t know what happens now. Everyone who tried to stop the bill last week was a hero, and I hate to feel as though their heroism was for nothing, but it looks like the bill won’t be stopped. And yet. And yet. Now there are people watching. Wendy Davis’s filibuster seems to have provided a symbol, a rallying point, or something, for all the people who want things to change. And the fight isn’t over yet. Dear Texas: please don’t stop the heroics.