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The amount of dudes in this comment section who really aren’t getting it is astounding…
is it not normal to assign stripper names to all the women you want to have sex with?
/s
No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists “don’t know how to design an experiment.”
That’s just what physics does to your brain. They’re all like that.
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It’s almost a punchline. ‘Fuck sexism, harassment, repression, and those god damn smug-ass physicists!’
Hey, not all of us! Physics was humbling in my experience. Had the exact opposite effect.
I did exceptionally well at a top physics university, and still felt stupid all the time.
It took getting my ass handed to me to wipe that veneer off my perceived awesomeness and realized I’m doing this cause I love it. Why would I think down on anyone else doing what they do cause they love it?
And I sure as hell came to realize that there’s people better at biology than I am at physics.
That said, lots of physics people are high on their own supply. So, not discounting the reality of physics dickheads that are in abundant supply.
What she has been through is awful.
I wish though that more people knew the difference between an Acknowledgements page and a Thank You page.
This should properly be titled Anti Thanks.
Acknowledgements should only cover individuals and institutions whose contributions are a direct factor in the material body of the text.
You should let her know so you can make your way into the next printing
Unfathomably based.
I appreciate her telling it like it is and not bowing to a pressure to please.
Bravo to the exceptional bravery on display here. I’m sure the majority of PhD graduates, including myself, wish they’d had the gumption to name and shame the suppressing factors contributing to a toxic academic environment. Reading this makes me kind of appreciative that my troubles were only administrative mismanagement and an inexperienced supervisor.
Also what the hell is up with TU Delft? It’s only partway through March and this is the second time this year that I’ve seen a PhD candidate publicly call out the institute.
Fuck these misogynistic pigs, idiots like these need to be called out more often. It’s too bad she couldn’t give names out and completely humiliate and ruin them.
Only if the accusations are true. It is just a post on the internet, there is no proof any of this is true or factual. Don’t be in such a hurry to harm others and damage their lives.
We should absolutely ruin their lives. Fuckem
As a woman, and having known many other women, I can promise you that none of what is mentioned is particularly far fetched. It’s sad, but we all have multiple stories like this. Almost any woman could put together a similar paragraph of incidents she has personally experienced.
Edit to add: she didn’t even name anyone! No one is harmed, except the people who know they should be ashamed of themselves.
As a man I’d have never believed how common such behavior is. I’d have thought that’s really outlandish.
Now I’ve gone through the (probably stereotypical) process of a guy having a daughter, she’s an adult now.
What she told me - no, all this stuff isn’t unusual at all. The first time she was afraid (and called me as she already had a phone of her own) she was not even 10 years old, riding her bike from my place to the ex-wife’s place, teenage boys catcalling her.
There’s a lot of us men around who find it hard to believe, because it doesn’t happen to US. But it does. Frequently.
I know it never happened around me personally, I’m tall and mean looking, but working in service for over a decade and most people don’t know how bad it is. You learn that the restraining order needs to happen BEFORE it gets worse not as it gets worse. And none of that protects workers traveling to work. You can’t let anyone walk alone to their car alone after close, and if a guy comes in and asks for an associate with those creep vibes, and they aren’t known to the associate or a part of their private life in anyway, you need to aggressively fight it. On visit two looking for her, you have to pull her behind closed doors and report to the police he’s stalking and get a restraining order. SECOND VISIT. Anything less and you’re letting to go way to far.
It’s not happening to us, but it’s happening all around us and we choose not to see it. Once my own daughter began talking to me about her experiences and pointing out men’s problematic behavior in public, I can no longer not see it.
A bit more, this is a chapter from a PhD thesis
As the husband of a woman with a PhD, let me assure you that I have witnessed several of these first hand when I travel with her to conferences.
While I agree with the first part of what you said, I don’t think the longterm solution is to call out individuals and make their lives horrible. It sure is a good way to maybe deter a few people from doing those misogynistic things. But what we need is actual structural change. It shouldn’t be possible these people to do such things in the first place without being sanctioned. And we should educate people more on feminism and intersectional struggles in general.
counterpoint: many people fundamentally need to be shamed if they’re being shitheads, or they will never improve. The important part is just that they also need to be given a clear way to redeem themselves.
Naming and shaming is part of the structural change.
Beautifully spoken
Sucks.
Live and let live, man! And preferably with no sexism!
why is this rachel too scared to name names?
Libel lawsuits are a bitch.
And this burden of proof is on the accuser.
I don’t doubt the stories, but a court would see it in a different way for a good reason. It’s hard to find a solution between slander and rightfully calling someone out.
This sounds like the University of Ottawa. Watching physics professors sexually harass the few women in our class was disgusting.
Start creating a list of them…
The university does this actually. It’s called the faculty list of tenured professors.
God damn
Name dropping TU Delft is surprising to me! Would love to know more about Rachel and her work if anyone has the original source.
I’m curious there, too.
Yeah… Not that surprising to me. TU Delft hasn’t been doing so hot. They literally have it all. Corruption, harassment, nepotism. But if you are not a PhD student you shouldn’t be too affected by any of these.
- https://www.ctol.digital/news/phd-termination-tu-delft-academic-fairness-debate/
- https://www.fnv.nl/nieuwsbericht/sectornieuws/fnv-overheid/2024/04/tu-delft-pleegt-censuur-op-eigen-universiteitsblad
- https://delta.tudelft.nl/en/article/inspectorate-of-education-ascertains-mismanagement-by-tu-delft-but-the-latter-criticises-the-investigation
- https://www.omroepwest.nl/nieuws/4830825/klokkenluider-tu-delft-maakt-levens-kapot-ik-hoop-dat-dit-eindelijk-eens-stopt
Thanks. I only heard about Delft from a woman studying there, and didn’t hear any complaints. I guess PhD students cannot run as easily, so they get the short end :(
Actually, I was loosely considering applying there, this made sure I won’t. That stuff needs to be made more public, so that their reputation noticeably suffers. Only then will people care to enact change.
Thanks so much for these links. I haven’t had time to look into Dutch sources. I have two good female friends doing their PhDs in other universities in the Netherlands in the sciences, and I’ve never heard anything even remotely close to this! They love their positions.
This is a pretty holistic article on all the “badness” in english https://delta.tudelft.nl/en/article/victims-of-social-unsafety-always-draw-the-short-straw-at-tu-delft-an-official-report-that-would-be-the-end-of-me
Edit: Just generally read a bit on delta if you want to know more. It’s the Uni press. They even got censored by the university when they first reported some of this if I recall correctly.
Dank u wel!!
Geen probleem 😉
Now I want an anti-acknowledgment section in my dissertation too
There is an excellent Science channel on Youtube and Nebula with a Physics PHD who’s made some eye-opening content about harassment and misogyny in STEM and Academia.
She’s a great science communicator. Another famous Youtuber (Captain D) called her “the Jenny Nicholson of science” her Dark Matter video is my favorite, though her Gell-Mann Amnesia video is a “must watch” imho.
Watch her dark matter video. And the follow up. But for the love of God, dodge the comments. SO MANY people read the title of the video and then went to make comments calling her wrong, even though she spent like an hour specifically addressing the arguments they make.
Dark matter is not a theory. It’s a problem. Fuck!
The only thing you should post in those comments is:
Dark Matter
Where is it?
How much?
Where is it?
How much?
Do we need it?
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Like I said, watch her video. She goes into lots of detail and gives a much better explanation than I could ever hope to. But here I go anyway:
The gist of it is that “dark matter” isn’t really an attempt to explain anything. Like, theory of gravity, we have some good rules, things accelerate depending on mass and proximity to other things. Theory of dark matter? Not so much.
Dark matter is a problem in the sense that it’s an observable phenomenon we can’t really explain. When we observe really far away stars and galaxies, they interact in ways that imply far larger amount of matter than what we are actually observing. So where’s that matter? We don’t know! Dark matter! But unfortunately that nomenclature and the many ideas surrounding what does cause the dark matter phenomenon have deeply clouded the conversation.
Dark matter is not a theory of how things work. It’s a problem to be solved.
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Uhh I guess it’s kinda like that, minus you knowing you farted. Imagine the dog barked and ran but you genuinely had no idea why that happened. As a joke you go “dang that was like I farted so bad even the dog couldn’t stand it!” But now everyone heard you say you farted, so any time a dog barks and runs away they call it “Rowbot’s fart.”
Dark matter may not literally be matter of any kind at all. All we know for sure is that objects with a certain amount of observable matter are, for some reason, behaving like they have much, much more. But also not with any consistency; sometimes it’s like 30% more, sometimes they act like they’re twice their size. We just call it dark matter because “dang it’s like there’s a bunch of matter we can’t see.” But we don’t really know what’s causing the discrepancy.
To be fair, it’s not like we’re totally clueless about it, but as of yet no single hypothesis has any concrete proof.
Here are two videos on that subject that are great to start out with
Love her videos! Really opened my eyes to a lot of this.
I recently got recommended her channel. She’s amazing, like Jenny Nicholson but for science.
Ok but, awful as this is, “you should consider it” is funny, ngl
Yeah, it’s a sexist comment implying she isn’t either qualified to be at the conference, or mistaking her for a passerby who is unaffiliated, and should consider working there. Either way, I don’t find sexism funny. Dunno why anybody would, but hey, I’m just some guy on the internet, so you do you.
It would work fine if the target was a man too, it’s just one hell of a burn. It’s a shame he was using it for evil.
Why “burn” someone you just met? That just makes you an asshole.
Without any context it or history its just kinda dickish? Like maybe a good burn to a rival in some sort of relevent scenairo but this just sounds like an attempt to belittle someone by “mistaking” them for something “lesser” then when called on it they double down?
Strikes me as grade school level bullying at best 🤷
I don’t think it’s that funny, just a sad defense for not being able to recognize that someone belongs at the conference instead of among the customer service staff.
