I recently had a conversation with a female resident in my dorm about how women are underrepresented in the top level positions of academia and industry. Our discussion centered around the fact that as a man, I come into the conversation with assumptions about how women should be treated in the work-force. I recently wrote her an email:

" I'm not trying to start anything here. Like I said earlier, I am 100% in support of getting women equal salaries and top positions in industry and academia. But getting there will be very hard, because of one fact:

Women bear children and are generally expected to the primary caretaker for their children at least through infancy.

Penelope Trunk is an amazing writer/blogger and her blog Brazen Careerist is one of the few blogs where every single post is both worth reading and worth saving for future reference. She also talks about her personal issues, liker going into couples therapy and eventually annoucing her divorce. But it's never annoying, but always mixed with some advice and reflection on the situation.

She blogged 6 years ago about how getting pregnant later in her career has affected her: Slowing down a career to have kids

I had access to education, I had access to the pill, I had access to money and jobs. I felt that society easily accepted my choices to be single, to focus on my career. Everyone told me “don’t worry about kids, you’ll have time.” ... I thought I was so smart, so organized and driven for waiting. But I’m not sure if waiting got me all that much except a high-risk pregnancy.

She blogged recently about what post-partum depression was like for her - a working mother with no time off - and the story is heart-wrenching, real and illustrates the difficulties that women who wish to have a family face when advancing their career.

The part of postpartum depression that no one talks about

Queer Formal, an annual dance held in Winter quarter, was on Friday at the GCC. I didn't attend this year. I have attended in the past, but this year I had no desire to go. I didn't really realize why until an hour before the event was supposed to start. My house threw a large happy hour as a preparty to the formal. The e-flyer for the formal said:

COME GET YOUR FREAK ON AND LEAVE TO DO THE HORIZONTAL HOKEY POKEY WITH SOMEBODY NEW (or old, or blue, or borrowed)!

*drag is highly encouraged*

So naturally the attire of all the people in my lounge en route to the GCC was . . . a strange mix of formal wear and "crazy fun drag wear". Granted, there were a couple of fiercely beautiful queens in formal wear. But the overall feel was very much a freak show feeling to me - complete with straight guys in drag. I still don't know how I feel about that co-optation of an element of queer resistance against a repressive straight society by straight people at a queer event. I'm happy when people fight gender roles, but I'm somewhat offended when it's done by those who don't understand the meaning and history - at a queer event, I suppose.

I guess what got me the most about Queer Formal this year was that it was marketed in a way that turned it from a formal into any other hypersexualized and freaky fun queer party. Don't get me wrong, I love those parties, which is good because queers hold a lot of them. But Viennese Ball was also on Friday.

Viennese Ball, probably the most formal dance event Stanford holds, is a very romantic, fun, and formal affair. But just by the nature of the dance (tuxes and gowns, leads and follows, etc), the entire event is very gendered to fit a straight society, and I know lots of queer people who are hesitant to attend. Two boys (or girls) in tuxes dancing together at this event would stand out much more than at a Queer Formal. I know that it's likely it wouldn't be an issue for same sex or same gender pairings at Viennese Ball, but many people in the LGBTQ community are very nervous about attending these "very straight" events because of past incidents, current climates, etc.

So the only option for a guaranteed queer-friendly formal event at Stanford is Queer Formal . . . or at least it was. Now, as my friends who attended report, "It was just another queer freakshow." Will we get more respect when we can demonstrate to the rest of the world that even we love romance, and getting dressed up to take out a sweetheart? Or will we be constantly doomed to prejudices of freakness or hypersexuality that we ultimately take up as a defensive measure?

I want a real Queer Formal. There is nowhere else to get this. I can wait until Genderfuk, Terra Parties, Queer parties, any weekend night in the Castro for tongue-in-cheek-drag and "horizontal hokey-pokey". Perhaps I'm just old-fashioned.

Last Tuesday at the Stanford Women’s Community Center, Terry Root, a recent recipient of the Nobel Prize for her work on the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC), came to discus challenges she’s faced in as a woman in the scientific community. Her first experience with sexism in academics came from her own father, who asserted “Girls aren’t supposed to be good at math”, when informed of Terry’s outstanding grade on a middle school math exam. She proceeded to become a math major at the University of New Mexico, later going on to pursue biology at the University of Colorado, and getting her PhD in the subject at Princeton. Historically women have had it rough in academia.
Now the gender gap is skewed in favor of women, with female students continuing to outnumber male students, in the admission process as well as enrollment. It is estimated that 56% of undergraduates in the US are women. While women are adequately represented in the undergraduate population, those numbers diminish as we look at the next steps on the institutional ladder.

Activism can be fun.

If you were in White Plaza yesterday, you saw a lot of amazing women and men congregated in celebration of Love Your Body Day, which is part of a national campaign to address issues of body image on campuses and in the world at large. The speeches and performances were very inspiring, particularly the performance by the freshman spoken word artist (a student in my dorm, Burbank House, I might add, but I won’t mention her name in case she’s shy.)

But what really struck me was that there was so much energy around something positive rather than in protest of some evil. Not that there is not a place for anger and dissent; we all know that there is. But too much negativity can lead to people falling into a vortex of apathy that starts with feeling overwhelmed and powerless. I think we don’t focus enough on supporting the ideas that ARE working in our society. Love Your Body Day was the kind of fun, celebratory activism I hope we see more of in the upcoming year.

The conference Feminicide = Sanctioned Murder: Race, Gender and Violence in Global Context will examine the murders and disappearances of women in Mexico, Guatemala and Canada that are occurring on an epidemic scale, and interrogate closely the gender, class, sexual and ethnoracial components of this violence against women. The aim and purpose of the conference is to stop the violence and map out ways to bring about justice.

Distinguished participants include Elena Poniatowska, one of Mexico’s most eminent writers, whose innovative writing advocates for women and the poor in their struggle for social and economic justice, and Lydia Cacho, who recently received the 2007 Ginetta Sagan Award for Women and Children's Rights from Amnesty International for exposing a net of pederasts linked to the government and big business, and for creating a shelter for the children, victims of trafficking and abuse in Cancún, Mexico.

The conference, presented by Chicana and Chicano Studies of The Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, brings together the most knowledgeable experts on the subject of feminicide in recent years, including mothers of murdered and disappeared women, activists, academics, writers and journalists, human rights lawyers, artists and filmmakers.

I recently posted on diversity of the graduate student population at Stanford. A recent editorial in Nature Medicine discusses this a little more (my emphasis):

The typical American lab is peopled almost entirely with white scientists. That's not reflective of society at large. A shake-up of the way minorities are recruited, trained and promoted could give minority representation in science the boost it so badly needs.

In 2000, the US population was 75% white, 12% black and 12% Hispanic. But the proportion of minorities that completed biology PhDs between 1993 and 2002 did not match these numbers: only 2.6% of new PhDs were black and only 3.7% were Hispanic. The proportion of tenure-track biology faculty in 2002 was even more disparate: 89% white, 1% black and 2% Hispanic.

These disturbing statistics tell only part of the story. According to first-person accounts, because minorities are often the only one of their ethnicity in their lab or department—perhaps even in their institution—they often feel isolated from their co-workers. Because they lack colleagues from their own ethnic group, they may feel unable to effect institutional changes to address the unique challenges they face.

One thing you'll find published about Stanford is the impressive diversity of the undergraduate population. But one of the little secrets about Stanford is that the graduate population is significantly less diverse, as the chart above demonstrates. If you're interested in learning more there will be a town hall forum at the GCC:

What: Graduate Diversity Town Hall Forum, Discussion of Implicit Bias
When: May 10, 2007 @ 5:30pm
Where: Graduate Community Center (750 Escondido Road), Havana Room
Free Pizza will be provided, all are welcome!