Male Scientist Writes of Life as Female Scientist

[sunnydale47]

Stanford neurobiologist Ben Barres has a unique perspective on gender discrimination in the math and science field.

An F2M transsexual who used to be Barbara Barres, he said his experience as both a man and a woman had given him an intensely personal insight into the biases that make it harder for women to succeed in science

Comments

[ms_interpret]

That's absolutely fascinating. Thank you for posting it. It got a good conversation going in my household today. :)

[sunnydale47]

Thanks, Shannon! I thought this was so fascinating that I spent a couple of hours gathering all that information from many different articles, each of which included interesting nuggets that weren't in the others, to be able to put together a more complete picture.

It's a real life laboratory experiment, where the difference wrought by changing only a single factor can be observed. Ben Barres is still the same person with the identical brain, talents, education, personality, and everything -- but how different his experience is now than when he was Barbara! They use identical-twin studies to try to sort out innate from environmental influences, but how much better when it's the very same individual with only one factor changed. ("...but then, his work is so much better than his sister's"!! And the specific "better" work being referred to was done by Barbara!!)

Barres's situation is very similar to that of John Howard Griffin in Black Like Me. (If you haven't read that, I encourage you to -- and get Josie to read it if you think

[ms_interpret]

The comment about the work being better than his sister's was one of the points I brought up with Josie. We all talked about whether the guy who said could have actually not realized that he was sexist in his thinking and that it was completely unconscious, and what we can do to stop that sort of thinking in its tracks when we notice it in ourselves

[sunnydale47]

Oh, Indians (which I've heard most of them prefer to "Native Americans") suffer from as much prejudice in the US as black people do -- in some areas, more. There is almost no Indian middle class; the tribes that have casinos are rich, and all the others are dirt poor. The poorest counties in the US are populated mostly or entirely by Indians. For example:Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is an Oglala Sioux Native American reservation located in the U.S. state of South Dakota. Pine Ridge was established in the southwest corner of South Dakota on the Nebraska border and consists of approximately 2.7 million acres (11,000 km²), roughly the size of Connecticut. Most of the land comprising the reservation lies within Shannon County and Jackson County, two of the poorest counties in the U.S

[annerism]

Grrrr.

I can verify from the biased point of view that this is all true. I've worked in an academic scientific environment my entire adult life so far, and have seen the attitudes and discrimination and ugly behavior to go with it. The first year I worked here, I helped run a conference on Women in Astronomy, to try to help raise awareness and help the situation, but honestly I haven't seen much different in 15 years.