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Category: Reflections

Physics seminar: Fixed and growth mindsets in physics graduate admissions

Last week, UW’s physics department hosted a seminar by Rachel Scherr, a UW physics alumna and senior research scientist at Seattle Pacific University who has also conducted research on diversity and education for the American Physical Society (APS). This discussion was prompted in part by the lack of diversity in this year’s cohort of physics graduate students: of 31 students, 30 identify as male. While the demographics of our chemistry department are much more balanced in terms of gender, the topic of diversity in admissions is important for anyone interested in graduate education.

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Women’s March

On January 21, 2017, several groups of students from the Chemistry department and WCS participated in the Women’s March to support women and their human rights. Rachel Boccamazzo, a senior biochemistry and biology undergraduate, provided an image, showing a small…

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UW Nobel Laureate

We’re delighted that a UW professor was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in physics, but are disappointed at the committee’s alarming trend of only awarding the prize to men. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/10/04/its-been-53-years-since-a-woman-won-the-nobel-prize-in-physics-whats-the-hold-up/

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Recap: Dan Grunspan, UW Anthropology, on Gender Bias amongst Undergraduates in STEM Courses

grunspan

Hi folks! Happy Memorial Day. Here’s my take on Dan Grunspan’s talk, titled “Old Boys’ Club Starts Early: Males Under-Estimate Academic Performance of Their Female Peers in Undergraduate Biology Classrooms.” After I give my two cents, I’ll provide some cool links! Some notes: Dan’s research differentiated between people using the words “male” and “female.” In order to stay true to his analysis, I will do the same (even though gender is a spectrum and male and female are technically references to “biological sex,” whatever that is).

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Lunch discussion: How do people react to reports of gender bias in STEM fields?

Our lunch discussion series (Thursdays at noon in CHB 339) continues! Contact me (hdnelson at uw.edu) or Teresa (tmheard at uw.edu) if you’d like to join our email list or access the schedule, or if you have a topic suggestion.


This week, we talked about a recently published study (Handley, Brown, Moss-Racusin, Smith; PNAS 2015, 112, 13201-13206) investigating how people react to evidence of gender bias. The authors showed that men view studies demonstrating gender bias less favorably than women do, a finding which has important implications for anyone interested in combating bias in STEM fields.

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WCS presents: Women in STEM lunches 

WCS-UW is kicking off a new event this year that we’re really excited about! Every week we plan to host a casual discussion on a wide variety of Women in STEM topics. Your hosts, Heidi and I, plan on covering anything from how the scientific community is responding to the latest uproar to the newest research on gender biases in STEM, and everything in between. We’re meeting on Thursdays from 12:00-1:30 in CHB 339. Don’t worry if you miss some weeks, we’ll be updating this blog with summaries of the articles and our reactions to them.

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Talking While Female

You may remember a piece WCS-UW posted a while ago about uptalk and how men and women use it differently (link here). To further that conversation, I’d like to introduce you to a piece that NPR recently published about which…

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