A necessary rant...?

[anghara]

So, there's this dude (I am assuming) at Deviant Art who has created a poster of "Action figures" of "Heroes of Science" - i.e. folk who have had an influence, presumably, on the world of science. He has drawn the action figures as they might appear were they actually real - they are, as far as I understand it, not real as themselves. There is just

Comments

[affinity8]

This is a very necessary rant, and thank you for sharing it! I agree: do justice to the whole of the human race and the many successful female scientists who deserve credit.

[eneit]

yep, I'd say this is definitely a necessary rant

[heron61]

Agreed. This dude is a study of what unconscious prejudice looks like:

"There are a bunch of reasons/excuses, not the least of which is that I honestly didn't think too hard about it, because I was flat-out manufacturing images of little scientists with no logical pattern to how I chose them."

IOW - he's saying "I'm a not very thoughtful individual who didn't consider that almost everyone I choose was a white guy like me - the fact that almost all of them looked like I do didn't surprise me at all and perfectly matched my unconscious prejudices."

[heleninwales]

I take your point about the difficulty of adapting the figures. My brother used to do model painting and converting when he was in his teens. But this set of figures demonstrates perfectly how the prejudice becomes ingrained.

Because the commercial firms that make the figures don't include many women and because the first names that always spring to mind are male, people like this guy go for the easy option and produce sets of almost exclusively male scientists. Then people see these sets and the "almost exclusively male" idea is perpetrated even further.

I hope that someone will take up the challenge and do a female set, either the original guy or someone who takes his idea and runs with it.

[lenora_rose]

The figures are all based on Star Trek: TNG and Star Trek: DS9 figures (primarily Odo from DS9, and Picard as Dixon Hill from TNG), and have been heavily modified in Photoshop using Liquify and a great deal of digital painting. Unfortunately, the figures aren’t real. I wish they were.

He's playing in photoshop. He's NOT actually modifying figures. I have experience doing both 2D and 3D work, and what he's doing is considerably easier than actual modding. This is not to say it's easy. I don't mistake easier for easy. But he doesn't need extra figures to practice on.

[dichroic]

Poop. No one on the current list whose name I know except Shannon Lucid and Sheila Widnall. (I was hoping one of my professors might make it on, or some of the co-researchers of the geneticist I worked for in college!) I think my favorite from the list is Kathleen Howell, the Purdue aeronauticist, probably because I understand her work and its import better than those in fields I haven't studied (and also because I wonder if a friend of mine who got her degrees at Purdue and is on all kinds of boards there might know her).

[dichroic]

ETA:
Women scientists I have studied with include Nadine Barlow and Fay Ajzenberg-Selove. Another woman whose work I studied is Caroline Shoemaker, who has found more comets than anyone else. Astronaut Wendy Lawrence was a member of my rowing club, when we lived in Houston (it looks like she hasn't worked in research, but you have to know your physics well to be an instructor at the US Naval Academy - and astronaut bios tend to be uniformly mind-boggling. NASA picks the best of the best, because they can).

Comment added because I thought it might be fun to mention some other women scientists with whom we have some ckind of connection.

[lenora_rose]

Agreed, agreed. One quibble.

No scientists famous for major medical breakthroughs. Primarily because medical heroes is a category all of its own, and there are hundreds to choose from. I’ve included Alexander Fleming here, because he was primarily a chemist, and because his discovery of penicillin was not a discovery made in the course of trying to cure something."

(No scientists famous for major medical breakthroughs, but you included Fleming because his discovery was made in the process of trying to "cure something"...? I, uh... okay, then.)

You missed the "not". This logic actually kind of makes sense to me. It's a weird way to make Fleming count on the science side- "Your most famous discovery might be in medicine, but it's disqualified there."