I have the feeling that we have run into a dead end in this discussion. As Cara Lin points out, women on the list have been describing their experiences, but I think the men are trying to identify the scope of the problem and talk about what can be done about it. Given that some women have complained of extreme bias while others have praised supportive advisors, I really do not come away from this with a sense of how widespread the problem is, whether there are a few very bad universities or whether they are almost all dens of evil, except for a handful (or maybe just the odd good person in the mix).
In the second paragraph of the posting below is a good example of the sort of statement that makes some of us automatically guilty -- I have also noted the dominance of non-white students in some classes. In fact, I used to teach at a US university located close to an urban ghetto, and although there were many black students in the introductory classes, some from the neighbourhood and some from Africa, the local students were almost all functionally iliterate, while the Africans were mostly the product of top British schools. The Africans moved up while many of the US blacks left, despite many remedial programs. There was certainly racial bias in the educational system, but I don't really feel that it was working at the university level. Still, statistics don't lie, and we are all guilty as charged. I guess we leave it at that and don't try to fix the system. Bill Silvert ----- Original Message ----- From: "Cara Lin Bridgman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, November 06, 2006 5:24 AM Subject: Re: gender bias: a summary of ecolog-L responses > Thank you, Anita, for this summary. I was noticing the same pattern: > the women describing their experience and the men classifying this > experience as anecdotal and asking for studies. Where there are > studies, I appreciate seeing them. When each generation of women > scientists experiences bias, however, it is hard to see what the studies > do, other than prove the bias is still there and that each woman's > experience is not idiosyncratic to her alone. > > I am white, but I have also noticed race bias. In my studies in the US > from college through Ph.D., non-white classmates were from other > countries. In Taiwan, aborigines are almost missing from biology > programs. > > CL
