Women in Skepticism - My Thoughts
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009Recently a fellow Calgary Skeptic got me thinking on the topic of women in skepticism. He asked me, as a female skeptic, the reasons why ladies are lacking from the movement, and how we can rectify this. I thought about it, and decided that before we can make a plan, we need to talk to skeptics about their perspective on this issue. So I posted an informal, short little survey on the forum, in hopes that both men and women would answer and I could roll it all together into a blog post. But then I thought, what do I think about this? So here are my answers to the questions on the forum.
I got into skepticism (to the chagrin of hard-core feminists everywhere) because my boyfriend was into skepticism – but I stuck with it (almost a year and a half now!) because I identify with fellow skeptics, because I believe that what we are trying to do is the right thing, and because SCIENCE RULES.
Unfortunately, I think the fact that there are so few women in our beloved movement is that there are so few women in the movement – an illogical statement (circular reasoning), to be sure, but I think if the female skeptic population was larger, more and more ladies would get involved – lady see, lady do. I’m not necessarily suggesting that women want solidarity in their beliefs, but the recruitment of new skeptics is done entirely by existing skeptics – friends introduce skepticism to friends, and more specifically, males introduce it to their guy friends, and females introduce their beliefs to their girlfriends. Also, as a fellow skeptic so delicately put it, “women feel uncomfortable at a sausage party.” I think this is true for many women – the large numbers of men can be intimidating.
My own personal feeling, for which I have no verifiable fact as support, is that women are overrepresented as victims of charlatans and snake-oil salesmen. I think (again, I have no proof) that psychics’ clients are mainly women, and women tend to buy into bogus health claims more than men. However, I’m not sure this is any excuse for there to be so few women in skepticism – as demonstrated at TAM this year by the impressive attendance of Albertans (the Bible belt of Canada), often those who are outnumbered make more effort to get themselves heard. Although most Albertans are religious, and woo is everywhere, skeptics from our province were way overrepresented at The Amazing Meeting. Using this logic (and I’m not at all sure if it’s transferable from geographic location to gender), women should be overrepresented, or at the very least fairly represented.
And is it important? Should we bother trying to recruit women? Is the lack of women an issue in the skeptical movement? Yes. It is vital that women get involved in skepticism, if only to up the numbers of the skeptical population as a whole. More importantly, women have different views on different issues – the female perspective applies to every issue of skepticism, and yet the male perspective speaks louder. The skepticism movement is an international one, but everywhere women are underrepresented. As I mentioned above, women listen to women – get some skeptical women out there telling the females in their families that homeopathy is bull and psychics are making stuff up, and hopefully they’ll stop the spread of harmful beliefs. And let’s face it, women are prettier, smarter, and more likeable – put us in charge of the skeptical ad campaign and we’ll convert half the world in no time flat.
And, for purely selfish reasons, I would love to have some skeptics to talk to who don’t compare videogame experience, who love shopping, who have never played WoW, who share lip gloss and hand lotion, and who can recommend hair stylists. As much as I love our monthly Calgary Skeptics’ Society pub meet-ups, girl talk is sorely missing.