Links for March 29, 2017
Why Is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women?
The study authors considered several alternative explanations for the low numbers of women in those fields.... “The more a field valued giftedness, the fewer the female PhDs,” the study found, pointing out that the same pattern held for African Americans. Because both groups still tend to be “stereotyped as lacking innate intellectual talent,” the study concluded, “the extent to which practitioners of a discipline believe that success depends on sheer brilliance is a strong predictor of women’s and African Americans’ representation.”
How Zootopia Gets Its Own Point Exactly Backwards
The biggest problem with Zootopia is that the simplest version of its idea – “different animals living together as a metaphor for modern racism” – is already pretty gross, for the simple reason that race is not biological. It’s a complete myth, a cultural concept that we made up. A white guy has as much in common with a black guy as he does with a white guy with a different hair color. (Biologically, anyway. I have no idea what their favorite Pokemon are.) Every scientist in the world agrees with this, except the racist ones.