If anybody wasn’t convinced that the Republican Congress doesn’t want to do anything about abortion except for talking about it, here is proof.
Obviously, there was no “women’s revolt” in the Congress. It’s all just a show. And we’ll keep witnessing the show for the next 8 years.
We all know what the anti-abortion hysteria (with its outgrowth, the insane 39-week law) has done to me. But I’m still convinced that this outburst of abortion talk is a very clumsy ploy aimed at distracting us from what is really going on. Let’s not allow ourselves to be dragged into this insanity.
Clarissa's Blog 
While you’re on feminist issues, I would be interested in your opinion on the “field-specific ability beliefs hypothesis” which is being bantered around the more erudite blogosphere. I do have a problem with studies based on Likert scales with free floating self referential data sets as well as small sample sizes with a reduced confidence limit.
Abstract:
The gender imbalance in STEM subjects dominates current debates about women’s underrepresentation in academia. However, women are well represented at the Ph.D. level in some sciences and poorly represented in some humanities (e.g., in 2011, 54% of U.S. Ph.D.’s in molecular biology were women versus only 31% in philosophy). We hypothesize that, across the academic spectrum, women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success, because women are stereotyped as not possessing such talent. This hypothesis extends to African Americans’ underrepresentation as well, as this group is subject to similar stereotypes. Results from a nationwide survey of academics support our hypothesis (termed the field-specific ability beliefs hypothesis) over three competing hypotheses.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6219/262.abstract
Seems to me that the basic problem is summed up in the following graph of “new faculty positions versus new PhDs.” When the water hole gets empty, the animals look at each other differently.
http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v31/n10/fig_tab/nbt.2706_F1.html
LikeLike
“We hypothesize that, across the academic spectrum, women are underrepresented in fields whose practitioners believe that raw, innate talent is the main requirement for success”
It is useless to look at this issue outside of the general societal context. This is not a problem academia has. This is a problem the entire society has. I constantly hear stories about young women who leave very promising careers (in academia and outside) not for any specific reason or with a specific goal in mind but “to look around,” “to think tings over,” “to take some time”, etc. The social penalty for this is non-existent if a woman does it and high if a man does. That’s it. That’s all there is to it. There is not enough motivation because there is no penalty for failing. Unfortunately, most people don’t get motivated without a penalty.
LikeLike
I have several students who are missing classes in order to go to the March for Life, and because I’m at a religious school, I have to excuse their absences. It makes me sick.
LikeLike