AAUW Press Conference
I went to a press conference on Tuesday for the release of a new American Association of University Women research report. Read the article about it that appeared on the front page of the Washington Post.
Presentations were made by Linda Hallman, AAUW's Executive Director, David Sadker, Professor of Education at American University, and Tamara Brown, an African-American engineer and President of AAUW of Buffalo. Dr. Sadker and his late wife built a career on researching gender equity in education. When they were working on their Ph.D.s together in the 1970's, his wife was always ignored and they attributed all her research to him.
During the Q&A session, I made a comment at the microphone that while I was working on my Ph.D. in the 1990's, I felt that my work was recognized, I was highly respected, and I felt I belonged in the program and was included in everything just as much as the men. But then I echoed what I said in the AAUW video last June.
I find it interesting that there are four or five people out there who dislike AAUW so much that they monitor the Washington Post comment site and continue to post remarks. What's not to like about AAUW? The AAUW report is good news: improvements in girls' education do not hinder boys' education. I'd like to know what the REAL issue is behind these people's anger. No good deed goes unpunished.
Luckily they choose to vent their anger in a comment site that will be gone in a few weeks. Other victims of misogeny end up stalked, raped, or killed. That's what I worry about.
Perhaps the issue is not about problems with the formal education we receive in school. It's about the problems with the informal education we receive through life regarding how to treat others with respect. We all need to learn to treat people of both genders with respect. No one can expect to receive respect without first offering respect.
Presentations were made by Linda Hallman, AAUW's Executive Director, David Sadker, Professor of Education at American University, and Tamara Brown, an African-American engineer and President of AAUW of Buffalo. Dr. Sadker and his late wife built a career on researching gender equity in education. When they were working on their Ph.D.s together in the 1970's, his wife was always ignored and they attributed all her research to him.
During the Q&A session, I made a comment at the microphone that while I was working on my Ph.D. in the 1990's, I felt that my work was recognized, I was highly respected, and I felt I belonged in the program and was included in everything just as much as the men. But then I echoed what I said in the AAUW video last June.
I find it interesting that there are four or five people out there who dislike AAUW so much that they monitor the Washington Post comment site and continue to post remarks. What's not to like about AAUW? The AAUW report is good news: improvements in girls' education do not hinder boys' education. I'd like to know what the REAL issue is behind these people's anger. No good deed goes unpunished.
Luckily they choose to vent their anger in a comment site that will be gone in a few weeks. Other victims of misogeny end up stalked, raped, or killed. That's what I worry about.
Perhaps the issue is not about problems with the formal education we receive in school. It's about the problems with the informal education we receive through life regarding how to treat others with respect. We all need to learn to treat people of both genders with respect. No one can expect to receive respect without first offering respect.
posted by Lisa Schaefer at 2:57 PM
1 Comments:
Hi Lisa:
Glad to see the Com'Post back.
I'm lucky to work in an engineering environment with a diverse and large group of educated people - pretty good distribution of both genders. It is at the highest level of management where women are less represented.
Microelectronic design has been rich as a career path in terms of opportunity to do research and extend my own skills - even to publish and extend the state of the art.
The problem I see now is one of the pie shrinking - and when that happens I think we may lose ground in equity and other important metrics. And - when our standard of living is constructed as if we live in a zero-sum-gain world, we get conflict and hate like the bloggers you mentioned.
Where I work, there are signs that the pie is shrinking for engineers in the US. We don't produce enough engineering students out of our high schools. We have also had a failure of vision. We have become so short-term profit focused that we have started to sacrifice R+D, and the schedules are so compressed that we spend most of our time validating designs that have been released too soon, rather than innovating. Thus we are eating our seed corn.
I think our culture in the US has been damaged by our failure to produce students who are adequately educated and civically involved. The culture, our corporations and our broadcast media have amplified capitalism to the point that it resembles cannibalism. Public policy is the only tool I know of which has the reach to repair the damage we have inflicted upon ourselves.
If we can shed the zero-sum-gain mentality and lessen the gap between the richest and poorest in this country, we might progress in other forms of equity. I hope we can pull it off.
Steve
Post a Comment
<< Home