Author: Ophelia Benson

It won’t do, you see. The Wikipedia gender imbalance thing – when taken with all the other gender imbalance things – won’t do.

Jane Margolis, co-author of a book on sexism in computer science, “Unlocking the Clubhouse,” argues that Wikipedia is experiencing the same problems of the offline world, where women are less willing to assert their opinions in public. “In almost every space, who are the authorities, the politicians, writers for op-ed pages?”…

According to the OpEd Project, an organization based in New York that monitors the gender breakdown of contributors to “public thought-leadership forums,” a participation rate of roughly 85-to-15 percent, men to women, is common — whether members of Congress, or writers on The New York Times and Washington Post Op-Ed pages.

Or atheists talking at atheist or secularist or skeptical conferences. That won’t do, because it perpetuates itself. As Clay Shirky points out, if most “authorities” are men, then the voice of authority sounds male. That’s no good.

It would seem to be an irony that Wikipedia, where the amateur contributor is celebrated, is experiencing the same problem as forums that require expertise. But Catherine Orenstein, the founder and director of the OpEd Project, said many women lacked the confidence to put forth their views. “When you are a minority voice, you begin to doubt your own competencies,” she said.

What I just said. The voice of authority sounds male; you’re a minority voice so that must be for a reason and the reason must be that you’re not competent so…you’d better just be quiet.

That’s no good.

I’m back. The CFI talk was good fun. CFI Vancouver did a great bit on the CBC’s Marketplace a couple of weeks ago: they gathered outside a hospital emergency room (“just in case”) and took an overdose of homeopathic “medicine.” 

It rained almost the whole time on Friday, and the same Saturday. It was a bit tragic, because I was staying in a borrowed apartment on the 34th floor of a tower next to the harbor, which was spectacular, but I knew it would be considerably more spectacular if it were clear, and it seemed that it was never going to be clear. But then Saturday evening, after I’d gotten thoroughly soaked three times, it started to clear and then clear some more, and Sunday was cold and crystal clear. I went out at dawn to walk around the edge of Stanley Park. It was…well it was a hell of a good walk, I can tell you. I saw a bald eagle sitting at the top of a fir tree on the north side. I saw four oystercatchers digging around in the rocks near Third Beach. I saw an eagle flying overhead near Second Beach, then I saw one sitting at the top of another fir tree. I don’t know if that was three eagles, or two, or one.

Then I went back to the borrowed apartment, and nearly fell over when I saw what the view is like on a clear day.

And now I’m back.

Update: I forgot to say: Fred Bremmer took the pictures. I stole them from Facebook.

I woke up early, so I have a little time to mutter things before I hit the road.

I’ll mutter about Sharon Rupp’s interview of wonderful me. I got a chance to name-check some atheist women:

 She is part of that cadre of professional atheists that includes best-selling authors Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, and a host of lesser known writers, none of whom seems to be a woman.”Oh there are women: Polly Toynbee, Katha Pollitt, Greta Christina…” Benson protests, noting that even the humanist-secularist-atheist crowd is subject to that old problem of blindness when it comes to women’s accomplishments. “I’ve asked conference organizers why there are no women speaking and some say it didn’t occur to them, others say they don’t know any.”

Actually I haven’t asked conference organizers, because I haven’t had the opportunity to ask them things, because they don’t organize me. Actually it was PZ who asked them, who asks them every time he speaks at one – “Will you please wake up and ask some women already?” And they tell him, “Uh……we couldn’t think of any.” And he smites his brow.

So props to Vancouver CFI, eh, they thought of one.

The bishop of Phoenix is getting some more glare of publicity, this time from Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. I hope more people will start to grasp just what it is that he and his Conference of catholic bishops are saying. They are saying that hospitals – all hospitals if they had their way, not just Catholic ones – should flatly refuse to save pregnant women’s lives by ending early pregnancies. They are saying that if ending an early pregnancy is the only way a particular woman’s life can be saved, then that woman must die. (They make an exception for something they call “indirect abortion,” which is enormously generous of them.)

Now the bishop, in effect, is excommunicating the entire hospital — all because it saved a woman’s life.

Precisely. That’s the bit that needs to be emphasized, and repeated. Some people think the bishop simply doesn’t realize what he’s saying. Oh yes he does.

The hospital backed up Sister Margaret, and it rejected the bishop’s demand that it never again terminate a pregnancy to save the life of a mother.

But the bishop remains a free man. He has not been arrested. There is no talk of arresting him (except for around here). He is using all the “authority” and influence he has in an effort to compel hospitals to let women die, yet no one tries to stop him. People defy him, but that’s as far as they go.