It is not often I am left speechless. This is one of those times.
URL for her “paper”: http://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2467&context=tqr
“Although Parson is a doctoral candidate in the UND’s school of education, she seems not to have encountered in her “advanced” coursework the decades of significant research in cognitive science that directly contradicts poststructuralist feminist theories about how people acquire knowledge. Parson repeats the old canard that people construct knowledge, which stems from the anti-scientific theory that truth is relative, and what is true for one person is not true for another because we have all had different sensory experiences. In this view, people make up “their truth” as they interact with the world, and it will necessarily be different from other people’s “truths.” This, Parson and her feminist theorists say, is the “feminine” way of learning.”
This shit right here, more than anything else, is what keeps women out of STEM. What better way to advertise STEM jobs to women and minorities than to tell them they are fundamentally incapable of understanding science?
God this grinds my gears. From the paper -
Although the corpus of syllabi explored was small, the findings from this exploration support the view of STEM courses as chilly. This suggests that there is an opportunity for STEM courses to reduce the perception of courses as difficult and unfriendly through language use in the syllabi, and also as a guide for how to use less competitive teaching methods and grading profiles that could improve the experience of female students
So basically we should make STEM fields less competitive and make them seem less difficult?! Just so that women feel comfy?!
How about NO?
STEM is competitive. It has to be difficult and people shouldn’t enter STEM fields expecting anything otherwise. This is just going to encourage poor quality students, poor quality research, poor quality science.
Just a thought - but if those fields are too competitive/ too difficult/too ‘chilly’ (whatever that even means) for some people then they shouldn’t enter those fields.
You know, I just spent three years studying optics. But I guess all the knowledge I gained is useless because I didn’t learn it from a feminist perspective.
Bah.