In article <Pine.WNT.3.96.990408100827.-872721H-100000 at Guinevere.unm.edu>,
Linnea Ista <lkista at unm.edu> writes:
|> I would bet you that most women have a far better grasp of
|> male "culture" and ideas and opinions and needs than men do of women's.
|> Why?
|>|> 1. Women are socialized to pay attention to the needs and emotions of
|> others.
|>|> 2. Men (and white men in particular) make the rules for the
|> predominant culture.
This "white males as the center of the universe" attitude pervades not just
the society of science, but the science itself. Last year when I got my
registration materials for the Society for Neuroscience meeting, I was
browsing through the list of suggested keywords for submitted papers and
came upon the following amusing tidbit. Words marked with a single asterisk
were designated "general: best used as a modifier with other keywords", while
two asterisks indicated "very broad topic." The keyword "male" had two
asterisks; "female" had none! I already knew that most of my collaborators
in the experimental world (I mostly do computational bio, very little wet
lab stuff) primarily used male animals to try to keep their experimental
populations as uniform as possible -- but I guess I hadn't realized that
the trend was so universal as to render *any* studies on female populations
new and interesting....
Karen
