Rationally speaking, is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry and science education. For more information, please visit us at NYC Skeptic's Doug. Welcome to, rationally speaking, the podcast, where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host and will be on YouTube and with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Gillard. Julia, what are we going to talk about today?

That's our topic today is something that was sparked by the recent incident that took up about three weeks of time in the atheists and skeptic communities. And that was elevator gate. Oh, gosh, yes.

So the incident has been thoroughly discussed on many, many blogs and comment threads and articles.

I wrote an article about it myself for religion dispatches.

But we don't that it's not about elevator gate say it's just sparked by elevator gate.

We want to talk about women and skepticism and whether there are things that are happening in the skeptic movement that make women feel less welcome or more broadly, why women are less fully represented in the skeptic movement and in science in general.

And we're lucky enough to have a woman as a co-host on the show, so we need to talk about that.

But you're right. So part of the issue here is actually a broader underrepresentation of women not just in skepticism, but in sort of science related stuff that excites our science and self.

And they're totally not independent issues either, because a lot of the leading figures in the skeptic movement are scientists or science writers. So, you know, and a lot of the material that gets covered in skeptic movement is about science. So one would expect those two issues to be intertwined for the rest of the show.

We're going to try to avoid a Larry Summers moment and make statements that are unsubstantiated by science. We'll just stick to your personal experience and to what we actually know.

What a skeptic, but not to not to do exactly what you just told me not to do, but OK.

But Larry Summers was speculating on potential genetic causes for for the gap in between men and women in the sciences. So I'm just just to check on the ground rules. Are we allowed to speculate?

I think we should speculate whether or not the president of Harvard, after all. All right.

So now we just said we're not going to talk about it, but it's there's a possibility that one or two of our listeners don't actually know what elevator gate was like.

Maybe someone was in a coma for the last month. Yes.

So why don't we just briefly summarize without obviously adjudicating things and then and then move from there?

OK, so elevator gate in at the end of June, I think Rebecca Watson, who skeptic and is a major figure at skeptic conferences and on the web, posted a video blog complaining about an incident that had happened to her at an atheist conference in Dublin in which she had been on a panel and she'd been talking about some of the difficult experiences that women have to deal with in the skeptic and atheist movements about being objectified and that sort of thing. And then at the end of the day, she's hanging out with people in the hotel lounge.

She not just going up to bed. It's like four I am at that point. She gets in the elevator and one of the guys from the crowd who is at the conference and had seen her speak on the panel earlier that day, gets in the elevator with her. And as the elevator is going up, he asks her, he says, I think you're really interesting.

Would you like to come up to my room for coffee? She says, no, they leave it at that. She goes to her room and then she posted this video blog saying that, you know, this was sort of inappropriate and made me feel uncomfortable. It was clearly a prop.. And I was, you know, a single woman alone in a foreign country, in an enclosed space, i.e. the elevator. And, you know, even men who don't mean any harm should should stop and think about the fact that women this may make women nervous because they don't know what you mean.

Any harm or not being in an enclosed space and being propositioned is, you know, understandably nerve wracking. I don't know if she said all of that right then, but she might have. I think she explained more.

And then we should clarify that the video that you're referring to is about 20 minutes long, but that this was only a very good point.

There was sort of an aside like five minutes and she said, guys, don't do that. And so this sparked sort of a minor debate on various atheists and skeptic blogs about how reasonable her objection was. And then that minor debate turned into a major debate when Richard Dawkins chimed in in a comment thread, basically sort of sarcastically chiding her for overreacting, essentially.

And and, yeah, comparing you wrote a sort of hypothetical letter to a Muslim woman.

Right? Right. Saying essentially, yeah. Dear Muslim woman. Yeah, yes. You have all of these problems like getting stoned for being raped and having your genitals cut off. But look at me. I have problems like being propositioned in elevators, so why don't you stop whining? It was a pretty sarcastic post.

So why does that not surprise me from Richard Dawkins? But that's a different question. Yes. OK, let's go outside. So anyway, so three, four weeks of debate over whether men have the right to proposition women, you know, regardless of the fact that it might make some women uncomfortable, whether women have the right to tell men. To adjust their behavior because it makes the women uncomfortable, whether men have the right to tell women how they should or should not feel about in situations such as this, how realistic is it for a woman in such a situation as Watsons to be concerned?

Because I think a lot of the people who felt that Watson was overreacting and that men shouldn't have to have to change their behavior in situations such as that, felt that that it just wasn't a realistic concern that the chance of of being attacked by a stranger in an elevator was so low that it wasn't really, you know, a realistic reaction for her to be nervous.

And other people insisted that, yes, it very much as which you say the most.

Well, I don't know about most, but many fairly prominent figures in, you know, people in the skeptic among both men and women have commented on this, saying, my take on it is that the overwhelming majority were actually concerned about Rebecca, you know, taking more or less taking Rebecca side.

But that sounds about right. Right. That an accurate description of.

But what actually concerned me and which is why I think we're talking about it today, it's two things, actually. There's there's two connections. And one of them is regardless of the specifics of the, let's say, the Watson Dawkins debate, let's leave that aside. What was actually disturbing to see was the tone of a lot of the comments posted by users of several of these blogs where these discussions were going on. So I'm not talking about the main posts.

I'm talking about the commenters common threads running thousands and thousands of comments. And of course, I have not read all of them by any stretch, but a good number of them were very ugly, clearly misogynist, clearly sexist, clearly, even even in some cases, clearly suggesting you the threat of violence against Rebecca, that that that sort of I think it's both an interesting and ugly underbelly of part, of course, of the skeptic and atheist community, which is why I think this has become such a big issue.

That brings me to the second connection. Um, the reason I wanted I brought up these these topic for the show was not actually not originally because of at a later date, but because I was reading the interesting post about Women in Science by Jennifer Roulet, who writes a blog called Cocktail Party Physics for Scientific American. And I was there. The blog starts with an interesting story about a woman named Linda Heinberg, who is a science communication intern at CERN in Switzerland.

And it was talking about how she felt a little of actually a bit of a chilly climate for women at CERN. This fits into actually a general broader concern in the physics community. Even the American Physics Physics Association has noticed this and has attempted to implement policies to encourage women in physics and also to sort of teach men in physics how to behave or how to make the environment more more welcoming for women. And then in the middle of the of these article that trying to elevate gate.

And I said, oh, Carl, this thing is actually made into Scientific American. So, yeah.

And and I thought that that's that was an interesting connection. Then all of a sudden, a writer who was actually interested started out by talking about women in physics. Therefore, more broadly, women in science made the connection with women in scepticism. And of course, as you were mentioning earlier, there is obvious connection because there's quite a bit of overlap in terms of interest and even people between the two communities. But this is the first time that I actually saw something that I thought was pretty limited in scope and internal to the to the skeptic community, which, after all, is pretty small actually getting that kind of exposure.

And so but I think that what we should focus on is the broader issue, not certainly not the elevator gate thing. And one of the things that I wanted to discuss a little bit was a couple of things that were mentioned by her left before she gets into an elevator gate, and particularly the experiences of Bernice Sandler, who is a feminist icon, and she's now a senior scholar at the Women's Research and Education Institute in Washington, D.C.. And there is a couple of interesting anecdotes that the blog, the Scientific American blog reports about Sandler.

And let me read you briefly what she says so that we can maybe chat about it a little bit. Sandra told the the author of the Scientific American blog that she first encountered the chilly climate for women as a feminist activist in the 1970s, sitting in a policy meeting in which she noticed that the new the few token women in the room were constantly being interrupted by the math. She decided to perform her own little social experiment, carefully keeping count of the number of times both men and women in the meeting were interrupted.

The results where I would say pretty obvious women are interrupted invariably by men at least three times more than others. Then after the men, I interrupted, this is not surprising. What was interesting was what Sandra did as a follow up to that. She shared her results with her male colleagues. The article goes on to say, who were predictable, of course, defensive, claiming that she must have miscounted or been biased in some way because, of course, that would never they would never do such a thing again.

This is not surprising. What's surprising is the what happened next? The next day, the blog continues. When the meeting resumed, the men were far more careful not to interrupt women when the women were speaking. And so Sandler got these realization, these aha moment where she realized that this is actually changeable behavior. What I thought was interesting in there was the psychological dynamics. Right. So somebody comes in. Measures in particular phenomenon shares that information with the people affected, the immediate reaction is the predictable one.

I do that surely there a mistake in the data, but apparently at some level they actually got either consciously or unconsciously aware of of of, you know, once made aware of this phenomenon, this problem, a potential problem that actually change the behavior immediately the following day. No, I don't know how, you know, lasting that change was, of course. And that's the thing. But to me, that suggests that perhaps a lot of this stuff could be avoided or at least minimized simply by pointing out data, pointing out behavior, which we, of course, would be the sort of rational, skeptical and scientific way to do things.

But I get the impression that a lot of these folks.

How do you compare. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Yeah, not to interrupt. You even have no idea.

It's tough because a lot of the behaviors that people consider Chile to women aren't the sort of thing that you could do a comparison to see whether they happen more to women than to men, to sort of a woman specific like women getting hit on, for example. It's a really common complaint I've heard.

Are we going to compare how often men are hit on by women, how often women are hit on by men? Like clearly that's already asymmetric in the population as a whole. And I don't know that we'd want to take that as evidence of sexism and misogyny if men hit on women more than women hit on men.

I mean, the interruption is sort of a nice, clean example because interruption itself is not a gendered activity. Right? Right. I wonder with the interruptions whether part of that imbalance could have been explained by the fact that men just interrupt anyone more than women interrupt people?

I think I'm not passionate about this, but I think that actually the count was separate for, you know, the count was of how many times men interrupted out of men as well, as opposed to the many times they interrupted women. So it wasn't just a matter of interrupting in general, but it would still result in an imbalance.

Well, it doesn't matter anyway. I mean, I've I've heard similar complaints. I'm sure that this is a real phenomenon.

I wonder also. So there was a great comment from someone on the teaser post about this episode.

Gil asked whether women have different experiences and the skeptic movement that they don't have otherwise. So, for example, he says, Rebecca Watson reported getting harassing emails from readers or and about men always trying to hit on her and skeptic meetings. And Gil says, well, this sounds like something that most women experience elsewhere. Regardless, does being involved in skepticism confirm some unique experiences? And and I think this is an important question. If if we're interested in whether the skeptic movement has like a woman problem, because there is there is some base level in the population as a whole of these kinds of incidents.

So if we want to say that the skeptic movement has a problem, it seems like we would have to be claiming that it happens more in the skeptic movement or in a different way or in some way that's different from the population base. So that's an interesting point. Yeah, this is something that I had actually noticed recently in a totally different context and leaving for burning men in in just a couple of days actually does this big festival in the desert. And and some people were talking about injuries.

Can you stand naked dancing and or is that was it? No, there's definitely all that. But it's not only that. There's also a lot of tech industry. Thank you. Leaders in tech and science and the media who come out and and a lot of artists who break it.

Anyway, it's a really cool festival not to get on a tangent, but it's also this huge, like 50000 person sitting out in the desert. And so people were talking about the danger at Burning Man, dangers of dehydration or danger of injury or the amount of deaths and injuries at Burning Man.

And so it sounds a little bit a little scary.

But then when you actually look at the numbers, you have to you have to check what would the expected death and injury rate be of a typical city of 50000 people over the period of a week, which is how long Burning Man lasts? And once you compare it to that, it's actually not more dangerous than being in a regular city of fifty thousand people. The type of deaths and injuries might be different for Burning Man versus, you know, the control of a fifty thousand person city run normally.

But if you want to see that Burning Man is dangerous, it has to be different.

Yeah, more dangerous in the case. That's a good point. In the case of the skeptic skeptic movement, we don't have obviously I mean, nobody that I know has done systematic research on this. So we don't really have the comparison numbers. But I think that the concern is coming out actually in some sense from a different perspective. That is, shouldn't the skeptic movement have fewer problems than other communities precisely because skeptics and atheists and. Unionists and all these other aggregated, you know, society things, people, they think of themselves as particularly aware of social problems, they think of themselves as rational, they think of themselves as particularly open about, you know, equal gender and so on and so forth.

So the idea, I think, is that even if you actually could show that the incident, the number of incidents of this kind is is no larger in the skeptic community than it is in the community, in the in the community at large. That still would be worrisome because the expectation wouldn't be of equality. It would be no, actually, that this this should be a more welcoming place, a more a more open place. Now, I say, you know, if it's not, then one would have to revise, I guess, one's assumptions about what exactly it is that the skeptics and Nita's actually think.

Yeah, you know, even if men let's take the example of men hitting on women. So a lot of women have complained that they get hit on sort of an overwhelming rate at skeptic events and that drive drives them away.

And so even if you had men hitting on women at the same rate that they hit on women outside of the skeptic community, just by the fact that women are a minority means that the women are going to feel overwhelmed by by the come on.

So that is sort of sort of a structural problem that doesn't result from behavior that any difference. But, you know, in the skeptic movement versus outside of the skeptic, you know, that's a good point.

You were asking a minute ago about what other kinds of behaviors other than interrupting, you know, a speaker, for instance. And so the article by who? That does mention a few and talking about science here.

Yes. With about science in general, about actually we're talking about physics in particular. But also she did she does discuss some what constitutes a chilling behavior. And examples are not just in professional science, but also in education, science education, in education in general, which is, you know, a teacher calling boys in class more often than girls, for instance. That's a chilling behavior, an example, a anywhere outside of science, a CEO, a CEO who ignores a woman in a meeting by listening intently to whatever a man says, especially when they're making similar points, a conference, E.M.S. that mentions a female speaker's appearance as a witch know, as opposed to how many times you do that for a man.

Right. That sort of thing. And of course, her last example was a guy, 80s skeptics meeting in England, a young woman in the elevator at 4:00 a.m. in the morning, and that's why she transitioned into that.

So those are all kind of chilling behaviors and it's not necessarily fair. I don't think the implication here is that they're done necessarily consciously, but I'm sure sometimes they are. But broadly speaking, is this these are behaviors that it's very, very easy not to be aware of, because, one, if a behavior or a certain attitude or a particular topic is embedded in the culture, you just don't think about it twice. You don't stop and say, in fact, there is a second article that I'd like to mention that made some interesting points in this in this respect.

This is by Democrat who is a self-described liberal, geeky, nerdy, scientific, perverted feminist artist.

She read the blog. Right.

And so she wrote an entry in on July 15, 2010. So we're talking about a little bit ago about Tim Russert, the amazing meeting eight, which is the one previous to this this year. And she asked the same question about that, meaning, why is it that there are so few women, not only in the audience, but also among among the presenters? And I'll get to some interesting data that she actually collected at that conference in a minute.

But one of her observations was that some of the perpetrators are major figures in skepticism. And she mentions, too, by name, one of them is a man and one is a woman, actually. And I'm pretty sure that the her idea wasn't to say, well, these people do it on purpose. It's just that, look, even people who are prominent speakers who ought to know better, they just don't think about it. The first culprit was Michael Shermer, who apparently including in a video, a situation where a, quote, hot hair had women used as examples of people who are into critical thinkers.

Well, I saw that video. Yeah, I was there, too. Yeah.

So it wasn't he wasn't saying that hot women are an example. I know. I've just I don't know exactly what Jen, but just doing right there, that's that's exactly the point, in fact, that I'm sure if you ask Michael, you know, we both know him. If you ask him, you know, what did you do that was that was your intention? It was it. Absolutely. That was not my intention. The question here is, well, why would you use a word, that kind of imagery in order to sort of characterize even even in, you know, within a talk given to a skeptic, meaning that kind of behavior.

And it gets more interesting, actually, with another speaker, Harit Hall, who is, of course, a woman.

And and Japan did the same thing, for instance, sometimes you mentioned Jenny McCarthy of the famous mother who who claims that vaccines cause autism. Jenny McCarthy. And our talk is an example of someone saying something stupid, but she would include a picture of her bending over in a bikini or in some other scantily clad after it. She says, well, why not showing Jenny McCarthy in a suit? And I checked. There are pictures on Google, right?

Or just a head shot or something like that. Right, exactly.

So the question is, why are you can talk about stupidity or ignorance without linking it to sexiness or femininity?

Yes. Or, you know, for instance, why don't you say you look at these stupid behavior, these stupid things said by X and show a man drinking a beer, for instance?

That would be a pretty good acronym, stupidity, but it doesn't happen. That's the that's the that's the idea, right?

Yeah.

I mean, you know, start to question this. This is not a question of intentions. It's a question of I think similar to the example that I brought up earlier of certain behaviors become come automatically. And I'm sure people would be defensive about it if if if the beer were to be pointed out to them and say, no, that's not what I meant.

Well, that may not be what you meant, but the subliminal, broadly speaking, message is of that type.

I think a lot of the anger that surrounded the question of that. Rebecca Watson sparked an elevator and other debates on similar topics.

The anger, I think, came from disagreements over whose side the responsibility fell on to remedy situations like this.

So there's a difference between saying to someone, hey, this behavior you're doing is making you uncomfortable. Would you mind stopping? Which doesn't imply that they have an obligation to stop versus saying, hey, you're doing this thing wrong. You need to stop because, you know, you're like infringing on my rights.

And these are these are not legal rights and they're not sort of basic human rights in the sense that we usually use the term. They're just sort of social rights.

There's this general set of expectations that we have about how society works and how people are supposed to treat each other. And again, these aren't laws, just just social rules, social norms. And so I think so the way Rebecca phrased her, her original comment was, guys don't do this.

And the word often got phrased when it was discussed in blogs and articles was, you know, guys, you should you should know better than to do this.

Like you have an obligation to stop this if it makes me uncomfortable. And I think that was what a lot of people disputed.

So I don't really I think I like your way to put it.

Actually, you're right. These are certainly there's no fundamental right that is being infringed upon here. It is a matter of social rights. I like that.

That phrase, you know, one of the commenters instantly took it to the whole well, it's a free country, which yes, it's true.

And it's totally beside the point. We're not talking about whether you have a legal right to take someone when you know this.

This reminds me actually of what was happening fairly often when I was in Knoxville, Tennessee, and I would have what I thought, polite conference confrontations with creationists in public places. No, like debates and things like that. I was trying to be polite, but certain people get offended just because you mention an idea. I mean, I actually run into people who said, you know, the very mentioning of, you know, the possibility that the Bible is not inerrant.

For instance, it's an offense to me. And several people approached me suggesting that they had a constitutional right not to be offended.

And wow. Yes, I must not have read the Constitution very closely.

And in fact, my response was actually, if we really want to be constitutional about it, I have a constitutional right to offend you, whatever the hell I please. Now, there is a different question there. Whether that is a good thing to do or not, whether it actually, you know, it's it's it achieves some kind of objective. And it's also there is also a question of whether this polite is the nice thing to do, but you certainly don't have a right not to be offended.

So I think that there is a situation this is a similar situation. I mean, I don't think that anybody could push the issue to the point of saying, look, women have a right to certain kinds of behaviors from some men, but exploitation, social expectations are different. They're weaker. And that doesn't mean that they're not effective or whatever because or that they're not they don't have consequences.

So but your way to look at to look at it, I think it's it's it's interesting.

Yeah. And I just it made me uncomfortable when people are talk about situations like this in terms of, look, if someone's offended, then you need to stop.

No, no. That's right. Yeah. So there's a spectrum. I mean, the question of whether this is a. Reasonable reaction from Watson is it is relevant. I mean, like you could if someone said, well, you know, it makes me if a group of people isn't that well, it makes them uncomfortable when you look at me because it makes me nervous. I think we would feel like that was less of a reasonable reaction. Obviously, what Watson said is not that unreasonable or not unreasonable like that.

But then there's this whole spectrum. You know, in the other end, there's like people who pull out a fake gun and pointed at your head and and, you know, we wouldn't feel it's very it's a very reasonable thing to feel like that's threatening behaviour. So exactly somewhere on that spectrum of reasonableness of objection is is a line that we sort of collectively have to draw about what's a reasonable objection.

And there's not an obvious right answer to that.

That's right. Now, since we are in a podcast about science and skepticism as well as philosophy, let's get to some data. We said earlier that there is not a lot of that, actually, at least none that I could find. But but there is a couple of things I want to mention and see. What how do you react? Again, one more thing from Jim equates article about Tammet. She actually collected data about which is not that difficult to do to say about Presenter's and Tammet.

And the first thing she noticed was that overall overall, there were, in fact, significantly more men presenting than women. I should add, by the way, that depends on the situation has improved significantly. Atem nine. And in part of that is because Grohe, who is one of the major organisers there, was very conscious about this kind of thing. So he actually went out of his way to erm to invite as many women presenters as as he could think of.

So the tamberg and this is what I'm about to say, it's not at all a criticism of the TAM organisers. It's just a matter of, OK, let's take a look at that particular snapshot, which was at 8am. And now what was interesting one was when the data were broken down in the following ways, that way talks, panel discussions and workshops. And if you do it that way, it turns out that if you're looking at talks, the number of men is overwhelmingly higher than the number of women.

If you move to panel discussions, there's still a difference, but it's less so. So there's still more men than women, but the gap is reduced, being reduced. And if you're talking about workshops, that is actually essentially equal numbers. Now, I'm not sure what to make of this, but it does seem to show that the more you move, there's at least two ways to interpret it, the more you move to do a more social events.

I would say the panel discussions and then workshops are more social less. They are less focused on one person the more there are women participants. By the same token, however, typically having been and many of these conferences that the talks are assumed to be or continue to be more important or more primary, more prestigious, most prestigious things than the panel discussions and extended workshops usually last. Right. That's the same, by the way, in science, it's just a matter of sexism.

So one can draw different conclusions as opposed to this kind of data and that in that respect. But it's an interesting observation that things are not once you divide the the numbers, things are not quite evenly distributed, regardless of the type of event. So this could be simply useful for the organisers to know that the workshops they're finding with the workshops there should be more careful with the panel discussions and much more careful with the with with the talks. Right.

And just to be clear, organisers, they choose who to invite. Right. This is not women choosing what they wanted, right? That's right.

I think this is the organisers have pretty much control over what they invite, who they invite and what they invited a person for.

So a couple of brief observations about that. First, there could easily, I would think, be a feedback loop in which if things got off on this foot at one point in which women were sort of put in panels and then put in speaking positions, then I could imagine future organisers easily falling into the pattern of thinking, well, you know, women prefer to be on panels or not even consciously necessary, necessarily just associating women with panels because that's what they've seen so far.

And then the other observation is it's tricky to figure out how much responsibility the skeptic movement bears if they're you know, to the extent that there are inequalities, gender inequalities in cases like this, if science itself is unbalanced and we are drawing, you know, our speakers from that pool, then, you know, if we were paying even if we we didn't know anything about gender, we would still end up with more men than women because there are more men in science than women.

So it just I think it's important to keep in mind, keep stuff like this in mind when we're thinking about blame just because it's it's one question. It's it's one thing to say, do we want to have more women in our movement than men? And another one say, is it our fault that there are not as many women in our movement as there are men?

That is correct. The the same goes the same exact discussion goes, for instance, when we're talking about ethnic differences, you know, it's. It's a pretty obvious observation, for instance, that in in science, in academic departments in general, not just sciences, but in academic departments in general, there are very few blacks compared to Caucasians.

Now, that's certainly not a good situation, but it's not entirely to blame on discrimination or entirely to blame on, you know, the discrimination in the sense of discrimination of the hiring committee or committees or something like that.

Because, in fact, I can guarantee you at this point that any university that would be very, very glad to get a minority ethnic minority. In fact, there is a lot of programs for hiring minorities, particularly for minorities. Often, however, it's difficult to fill those positions.

And the reason for that is because there's few people in that area, and that is because of a series of complex social causes that go all the way back to, you know, elementary education.

So there is discrimination at some level, but it's not necessarily at the level of the organizing committee or the level of the hiring committee. Right.

I think we should probably talk we should make sure we talk about issues like reasons why there might be fewer women in science and skepticism.

That's right. And it reminds me of the last piece of sort of evidence, although this is more anecdotal that I wanted to bring up. There's an old article that appeared in March 1996. So this is definitely old by the end, Wimer. And it was probably this was published, in fact, which is spelled out. And if the publication of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking, even at that point at that time in 96, there was these discussions going on in the skeptical community about why there are so few women in skepticism.

And so why did some some sort of informal survey? We can post the link directly to the article. It's in two parts.

And she basically started collecting suggestions or responses from people about why do you think that there is that this distinction, this difference in the numbers between him and I read you some of the responses in that she received and we can talk about about how much sense they make or they don't make. So No. One, skeptics are largely drawn from the hard sciences or philosophical areas which are dominated by men. So in other words, that's what you are doing, right?

We're saying that this is simply a reflection that science at large or I thought the Kaminey economy at large is dominated by men, and therefore that's where the where the bias comes from. And so it's not skepticism per say, it's the result of science. Number two, the structure septics organization organizations and this is this is this was specific to the way in which the former cicotte of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which is now a CSO, the Committee for Skeptical Investigation, the way they created and structured the local skeptic groups.

The suggestion was that that may affect the gender makeup. For instance, the group study typically by simply sending a male to local subscribers of magazines like Skeptical Inquirer, since it turns out that most of the subscribers are males, then therefore most of the time is the male that starts the group and so on and so forth. Then it goes from there. The third suggest explanation is that there is an increasing demand placed upon women in the workplace and at home, and so they just don't have the time, meaning that men don't share typically still in our society, the same amount of work at home.

And so if in a couple in a family, both people work and they have full time jobs, then it turns out that on top of that, the woman typically, not always, but typically does a lot, if not all of the home related stuff, including children and so on and so forth. So you just don't have the time.

We could test that one by looking at, say, student groups to see. Yes. I mean, because if student groups are also on balance and that sort of takes them to witness some of the wind out of the sails of the if the home making hypothesis does.

Of course, you know, we have to remember that these are not mutually exclusive about this. And so one might need actually a multifactorial sort of analysis of what's going on there. But you're right that it's certainly not the exclusive explanation. The fourth possibility was that women think differently than men do, which, of course, comes up often in these in these kind of discussions. And one of the respondents to the survey said, you know, because they are above above all that or conversely, that they are inherently logical creatures.

In other words, the two explanations are either women just don't care because they're they're superior to these kind of things. They're not concerned with silly things like skepticism and critical thinking or they're just illogical.

And, you know, after all, there is in fact and this is true evidence that women have nationwide the higher belief in the paranormal than men do.

So. Is that, in fact, the case? So that's that do you know what they. I've heard that, too, but I don't know exactly what they're referring to. But paranormal, because I.

I know that there are types of paranormal belief that are more dominated by men like, uh, if you ever been to a Bigfoot convention or, you know, UFO belief in UFOs, that's definitely more male than women. But of course, women are also more likely to believe in astrology.

So I don't know how if you were to lump them all together, figure out all of the different paranormal beliefs and then break them down.

I've I've seen data about that. And it turns out that they're both both things are true. That is absolutely correct. As you said, that there there is a distinction of gender distinction between the types of paranormal beliefs that people tend to be to gravitate toward. But it is also true that if you compiled the data together, women do come around. Not by much. I mean, we're talking about a few percentage points in the population. So, you know, does that does does that contribute to the explanation?

Well, possibly.

Also, there's a big judgment call about what to include in your set of illogical beliefs, like would you include conspiracy theories? They're not necessarily paranormal. But, you know, maybe if you included those, the numbers would shift to being more men than women and, you know, illogical beliefs. I don't know.

I'm just and I guess the last possibility is that women simply handle social interactions differently and they're not interested in conflict. And skeptical organizations, publications and all that are a lot about conflict.

That that is true. I think I mean, anecdotally, that seems to go right. Right. Yeah. So so what's what's been your experience then about all of this? Well, let's talk let's get a little more personal. So how did you get to begin with interviews and you ever felt it? Um, you know, discrimination. And that's without naming names. Of course, we don't want to start another elevator gate.

So I should say starting off that I definitely can't speak for all women. And, you know, my experience is I do know how representative it is of other women experience.

I tend to this is not what you were doing, but I tend to get frustrated when people talk about women's experience or when they ask me to, you know, how women experience something because I can I mean, maybe my experience is going to be slightly more likely to represent other women's experience than the experience of a typical man. Right. Just because, you know, I'm probably going to have at least a little bit more similarity with your, you know, typical other women, but not a lot.

I mean, I'm still not at all confident in my and my ability to predict how other women experience things.

It's a similar thing when people assume that because I'm Italian, I'm a representative of Italians, that actually the very fact that I moved to the United States, I mean, I'm not that's a good point.

I guess I don't really have anything like that. And there's nothing that makes me obviously unrepresentative of other women.

But I mean, I've never to my knowledge, I've never been discriminated against in the skeptic movement or really in life.

I mean, I, I, I exist in a pretty sexism free world.

As far as I can tell New York City. I know it's actually true.

I would say I grew up just outside of Washington, D.C., in, you know, one of the most like progressive and well-off and well-educated suburbs. And I went to school in Manhattan and then I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and then to New Haven and then back to Manhattan. So, yeah, that's definitely not representative. But I mean, OK, so just talking about the skeptic world. Yeah. I mean, yeah, people hit on me sometimes.

I mean, it doesn't bother me say that's not to say that other women who who are bothered by it are wrong in any way. Right.

I find it pretty easy to deflect when it does bother me.

So, you know, I it's I mean, it's also possible that being young and female has hurt me in some ways that I will never know about. I mean, maybe there are people who don't take me as seriously as they would have because I'm young and female or positions I could have had that I wasn't I might not ever know about those things. Right. But I mean, I've never felt unwelcome at all.

Okay, so we have to have at least one good story as a sample size of one, which is optimistic.

So I think, you know, I should say, I suppose I I am careful to sort of treat my public persona in a way just because I have heard other stories from other women. So, for example, I have a lot of Facebook friends who aren't personal friends of mine, but who are readers of the blog or listen to the podcast or who have met me at a conference or something like that. I'd say probably at least a thousand people I've never met on my Facebook friends.

And and I often post links to my my blog posts or podcast links, that sort of thing, articles I've written.

And and there there are sometimes comments that refer to my looks or that are sort of like Winky or flirty. And I delete those instantly just because I think it probably is pretty.

Easy for people to see comments like that and and start to think on some level that the woman the comments are just too is inviting them in some way.

Yes. The other side of that problem, I don't I don't get many comments.

And yet the ones that I get, I leave them there, actually, you know, I like them a little shrines that delete new posts about ones, that sort of thing. OK, well, that's that's that's a good thing to know that at least some experiences have been.

I've been positive and it'll be interesting for somebody to actually do a serious study where, you know, this is this is probably not just skepticism in particular by science in general. This is probably the kind of topic that I would think that some serious social research could be done. And especially when looking at micro communities like the skeptic community or the atheist community. Another possibility, for instance, is that there are differences between the skeptic and the atheist community or between the atheist in the second humanist communities, because the members of those communities, although they over the membership, overlaps quite a bit.

They do see themselves as significantly different in terms of general attitude toward life, the universe and everything. So it's possible that even gender issues might be different.

Can I can I make a couple takeaways here before we wrap up the two things that I, I would want to leave other people with our first that I wish that we could have these discussions, you know, these Internet wide blog wide discussions without people jumping on other people for for expressing skepticism about, you know, their claims about how people should act or how, you know, most quote unquote, women feel.

Because I have I have talked to a lot of people who I consider very rational and very thoughtful and very considerate people in private who've said that they they've disagreed with some of the things that have been said on the blogs, but they don't feel comfortable saying so publicly because they're going to be pilloried.

And I've had discussions with people where I've questioned some political or ideological belief that they have and and it's become very emotional very quickly.

So I really wish we could have these discussions without that happening, which I think, you know, in a community that prides itself in rationalism will be possible, but apparently not so easy.

Yeah. And then the last thing is just that I think that it's easy to forget that when we're talking about differences between men and women, that that does not necessarily mean innate differences. As we've discussed in earlier episodes of the podcast, it's really hard to separate out genetic from socialised differences between men and women. So even if we were to say that women are more concerned with maintaining sort of social order and therefore are less inclined to to challenge ideological beliefs, that doesn't necessarily we're not that's not necessarily a statement about women's genetic disposition to do so.

That's exactly right. OK, all right. I've said my piece. We're all out of time. So let's wrap up the section of the podcast and move on to the rationally speaking, PEX.

Welcome back. Every episode, Julie and I pick a couple of our favorite books, movies, websites or whatever tickles our rational fancy. Let's start as usual with Julia's pick things Mazlo.

My pick is a set of essays. They're all online, but there's also collected in a book. The author is a guy named Paul Graham, who's a computer programmer, a really brilliant entrepreneur, and currently runs a startup incubator called Y Combinator. He is also known for cofounding VOYEURWEB and inventing spam filters. Really clever guy. And so he's written a bunch of essays on society and culture and programming and also rationality. So they're really clear and well-written and thoughtful essays.

He's got kind of a large following and there's a couple in particular that I think that listeners of this podcast might be interested in.

One of them is called What You Can't Say, and it's about learning to recognize the areas of belief that are sort of taboo or the opinions you hold that are so socially determined because you don't feel comfortable considering alternatives to, you know, what is socially acceptable.

And so he talks about ways to recognize those kinds of beliefs and start, you know, picking away at them.

And he's also he's written an essay on lies we tell the kids. So he talks about potential consequences of lying to kids, about how the world works or even about things that seem more lighthearted, like about Santa Claus. And he makes a case against that.

So I would recommend going to program dotcom and clicking on essays.

OK, my pick is a book that came out fairly recently. It's called Not For Profit Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. And it is really it's by Martha Nussbaum, who is a prominent contemporary philosopher. It's really intended consciously as a manifesto in defense of, you know, liberal arts education in general, in the humanities in particular. And the reason for that is very well argued. That's an interesting book. It's not very long. It's it's less than a couple hundred pages and it covers very different aspects of the psychology of and sociology of teaching.

It deals with recent trends in teaching. And it does feel a little bit with the sort of background history of how do we get a liberal arts education to begin with. For instance, in the United States, this was largely not exclusively but largely the result of the large influence of John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher. At any rate, Nusbaum does a good job. The question is defending a liberal arts education. The question is why does the execution need defending?

And I've been experiencing this myself and in my own institution, but talking to colleagues and following, you know, sort of articles in places like The Chronicle of Higher Education and so on and so forth. There's been throughout the Western world is not just an American thing in England, very similar thing is happening. There's been a pretty much systematic, um, cutting of humanities teaching and support on university campuses. Several philosophy departments, for instance, have been closed recently in British universities and even in the United States.

There's a lot of, um, reforms that are that are aimed at reducing the importance of general education courses, which typically tend to be philosophy, arts, languages, for instance, or things like that, or the various studies kind of courses or African-American studies, gender studies and so on and so forth. Those are the ones who usually hit first. And then next you have you got history and, you know, all the other all the other things.

Um, Vidia, is that this has been done in the name of efficiency, in the name of practicality. After all, if you want to college from a college degree, you want you want something that can get to a job and so on and so forth. And of course, that's why he's not claiming that. That's not what you should want. You should, but that is only one of the things you should want out of education. The other thing that you should want out of education is the ability to think critically about society at large, particularly in a multicultural society where you have to deal with different religions, different ethnic groups, different histories, complex issues that a more technical type of education simply does not prepare you for.

So I highly recommend the book. It's very well. It's a quick read and I'm sure it will generate quite a bit of food for thought.

And of course, the question of whether humanities departments, the universities actually do help students think critically is one that we've discussed on an earlier episode of our podcast on teaching the humanities. And I gave a bit of friction on that issue then. But I'm I'm curious to read what Nusbaum has to say on the subject.

Right. We are all out of time, so this concludes another episode of the rationally speaking podcast. Join us next time for more explorations on the borderlands between reason and nonsense. The rationally speaking podcast is presented by New York City skeptics for program notes, links, and to get involved in an online conversation about this and other episodes, please visit rationally speaking podcast Dog. This podcast is produced by Benneton and recorded in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York.

Our theme, Truth by Todd Rundgren, is used by permission. Thank you for listening.